Comments on: Decisions on Listening to Music

By: Moo

Moo — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:17:38 +0000

You could also use XMMS2 instead of mpd

By: Andrew Ruthven

Andrew Ruthven — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:31:48 +0000

Hi John,

You can get encription with mpd if you feed the audio stream to an icecast2 server, then use that for your remote access.

By: Tom Moertel

Tom Moertel — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 01:50:56 +0000

One solution I didn’t see mentioned is what I use: Sonos. Basically you buy a bunch of stand-alone smart speakers that create a mesh network you connect to your LAN for access to local music and also Internet streaming services (just about every service you can image is supported). You control the speakers with your phone, telling them what to play and how to work together. (I use the Android app; my wife, the iOS app.) The system pretty much Just Works, letting you, for example, play perfectly synchronized music across units in different parts of your house and even “move” music between units on the fly. And the sound is good.

If you go with a Sonos solution, I recommend the larger PLAY:5 units over the smaller PLAY:3s. Both sound surprisingly good for their size, but the 5 is worth the extra $100 unless you’re fitting out a room that’s too small (or too noisy) to justify the larger unit.

For music on the go, I use both Google’s and Amazon’s cloud services. Both get the job done, but neither has a convenient solution for synchronizing with my Linux-hosted music library.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:01:38 +0000

Ah, it seems ownCloud just uses ampache. Another project that seems interesting is http://www.tomahawk-player.org/ though I find it still very buggy.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:54:25 +0000

You may also want to look at ownCloud – http://packages.debian.org/sid/owncloud

It has music streaming built-in, though I don’t know what the playlist support is like.

By: rjc

rjc — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:33:11 +0000

You hadn’t mentioned SqueezeBox/SqueezePlay in your summary. Did you have a look at it?
It might be what you’re looking for.