A DIY Music Streamer – Overview
With good quality CD transports and players rapidly disappearing we wanted to make something to preserve and future proof your CD music collection and continue to enjoy your music.
The aim of this musiclab project will be to make a digital media player that can organise and play music files into a traditional analogue music system. A plug and play replacement for a CD player.
The Basic Concept
This project is based around the UK made Raspberry Pi single board computer which has a huge international following and support base accessible to all using the internet.
We will be using open source software which many very talented people have given their time and expertise freely in the true spirit of the internet and hate what money is doing to try and control it! Hence this software is made freely available to all.
The software can support many audio interfaces and DACs so you should be able to put together your ideal player from a large selection of add on boards (sometimes called “Hats” as they usually sit on top of the main Raspberry Pi computer PCB.
Using streaming services
For those of you who wish to go beyond streaming your own music collection and use commercial streaming services we will try to give you some ideas of how to do this.
However the commercial services charge manufacturers a lot of money for “licences” for the privilege of using their services as well as charging their customers directly so we will only offer some ideas and pointers for doing this and we cannot support using the system for commercial streaming services.
What do you need to build your own streamer?
The next page will help you to plan your media player project and what you will need to make it work.
Next page – Planning