[Cialug] In-home music - SOLVED

[Josh More]

Quite some time ago, I had a thread about streaming music in the house.
Before that time, I was using LTSP.  It's advantages were that it used
diskless workstations that did PXE booting so I could play everything with
XMMS with a dedicated interface.  It failed as my music collection grew
larger, I increasingly wanted to spend time on systems that lacked easy GUI
access and moved to a house where most of it was connected via WiFi.

You guys suggested a lot of things, which all failed due to cost, lack of
shuffle support (I did have a kludgey Perl script that randomized
playlists, but, well, kludgey).  Plex was the most promising, but I never
could get it to index all my files properly.

Finally, today, I think I found something that works.  In the interest of
closing the loop, here's what I'm doing:

My core system is a Synology NAS.  It is running the Media Server app and
configured to index the entire Audio folder.  Each stereo in my house has a
Miccus Home RTX bluetooth receiver attached to it. I've paired each Miccus
to a different Android device.  Each Android device has BubbleUPnP
installed.

The app not only allows me to stream from each device to it's paired
receiver, but also (under limited testing) to any other BubbleUPnP instance
on the network.  It gives me shuffle, zero additional fan noise in the
room(s) and the ability to control what's going on in every room in my
house. Also, unlike when I tried adding my Windows and OSX systems to the
mix, there have been no skips at all.  Apparently an NVIDIA Tegra 3 running
Android has more resources than an Intel Core i5-4200U running Windows
8.1.  Can't say I'm shocked.

Total cost for the audio side of things is less than $200.


-Josh