BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi (v2)

This is an update to my recent post on this topic.

This page shows how to create a simple radio command to play and stop different BBC radio stations on a Raspberry Pi. Once set up, you can just type e.g. radio BBC4 to get your favourite station playing. This is useful for various reasons, for instance if you have a room with just an amplifier and speakers in then, with a Raspberry Pi, you can listen to the radio (and with other software your music collection). You can also listen to BBC 6 Music which you cannot get on FM.

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BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi

This page shows how to create a simple radio command to play and stop different BBC radio stations on a Raspberry Pi. Once set up, you can just type radio BBC4 to get your favourite station playing. This is useful for various reasons, for instance if you have a room with just an amplifier and speakers in then, with a Raspberry Pi, you can listen to the radio (and with other software your music collection). You can also listen to BBC 6 Music which you cannot get on FM.

Read more…

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (v3)

Morse Code Transcriber

I have been working for a while on a tool to “listen to” and transcribe Morse code. I’ve been wanting to do it for ages and considered a variety of ways, but with more browsers supporting the Web Audio API the time seemed right to give it a go.

Ultimately, the tool will be integrated into my Morse code trainer to listen to students practising the segments of Morse code in that tool and let them know if they are doing it well enough. For now though, the Morse code transcriber is just an alpha-release stand-alone tool which only works properly in Chrome (I should be able to make it work in Firefox as well).

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Getting a Python script to run in the background (as a service) on boot

For some of my projects I write a simple service in Python and need it to start running in the background when the Raspberry Pi boots. Different Linux distributions use different ways of starting and stopping services (some now use Upstart, some systemd). I am using the “Wheezy” Debian distribution on my Raspberry Pi, and in this case the proper way to do this is using an “init script”. These are stored in the /etc/init.d folder. In there you can find scripts that for instance, start the networking system or a print server. Debian Wheezy uses the old Sys V init system which means that these scripts are run according to symbolic links in the /etc/rc.x directories. The Debian documentation explains this.

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Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (revisited)

Sound configuration on Raspberry Pi with ALSA

While setting up a Raspberry Pi to play streamed music using UPnP, I have had quite a bit of trouble understanding how to configure the sound on my Raspberry Pi. This is partly because I am running it in headless mode (no graphical desktop) and partly because sound on Linux is fiendishly complicated.

Anyway, I am making progress in understanding what’s going on but I am no expert. Here are my findings on how to control the ALSA system from the command line. All I am focussed on here is getting control of the sound output by the 3.5mm stereo socket. If you want to control the output over the HDMI socket or an external USB sound card then you’ll need to do some of your own investigation.

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Using a Raspberry Pi with Android phones for media streaming with UPnP / DLNA

This summarises and completes my previous posts on configuring a Raspberry Pi to play music streamed from another computer in the house, using Android phones as remote controls.

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Making gmediarender start on boot

Now gmediarender is compiled and gstreamer works on the Raspberry Pi we need to get it all to start on boot.

Fairly standard stuff here (copied from Malte’s post in Chris’ blog). Create a file /etc/init.d/gmediarenderer with the following contents:

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Getting gstreamer to work on a Raspberry Pi

Having now got gmrender to compile and run on the Raspberry Pi and use gstreamer as a backend I need to fix the audio quality issues. A bit more googling revealed a post from someone doing much the same as me. One of Chris Baume’s commenters also had problems with the audio quality and suggested that directing the audio via PulseAudio fixed it.

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