Home Music Streaming

I wanted to be able lis­ten­ing to my music from pretty much every­where in the house while being able to keep track of the songs played using last.fm. So here’s an overview of the setup:

I use Amarok as the main audio player (with an iPod often attached to it) on my desk­top com­puter from which dar­k­ice is tak­ing its audio from and stream­ing in ogg/vorbis to an ice­cast server. Then I have a Zau­rus run­ning Open­Za­u­rus directly con­nected to the actual sound sys­tem through a 1/8 to RCA cable. MPlayer is used on the client side since I ran into numer­ous prob­lems using xmms for Open­Za­u­rus while lis­ten­ing to stream­ing audio.

Set­ting up Dar­k­ice is pretty straigh­for­ward: just start from the default con­fig­u­ra­tion file and remove any use­less sec­tions (icecast-0, shout­cast …) Then make sure you tog­gled record on the “vol­ume” slide in sound panel. That way, dar­k­ice will stream all audio that is fed to the sound card.