Hey everyone!

I wanted something to plug into my hi-fi that can play my music without having to use my mp3 player. I looked online for the proper seperates and did not like the price at all

I've got some old computer bits lying about so I thought hey how about if I make a music server. I've been playing about with it for a little while now and I've got it working, but now I want to make it better so I can run it with normal hi-fi type input and output devices.

What I need help with is I want to be able to control the system with an IR remote. The remote for my amplifier also has CD player type controls so I intend to use that. I'm not sure what IR devices are supported, how I can map the button presses etc. Then I thought further from this and because I don't want to have to use a monitor I thought I could use an LCD panel to see what I'm doing. Although I have found some useful sites, I'm having problems working out exactly what I need to buy and how I will implement it. My main problem with purchasing is I'm in the UK and I don't fancy hefty postage and import tax.

To aid those helping me this is what my machine is currently running:
Debian 4 in command line
Using ALSA for my sound output
Playing the tracks with the Music Player Daemon (MPD)
Uploading tracks with ftp
Currently controlling MPD with phpMp and mpc

Any help suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance: Xzi

Do you know geexbox?

No I'm not familliar with it, I'll Google it to see what it is .

Hi,

I am currently running a similar setup to yours: I have a box running MPD on Debian Etch hooked up to my stereo, which I currently control with either PyMPD or Pitchfork. Rather than copying files using FTP, it would surely be better to use something like NFS or Samba (in my setup, the files are stored in a Samba share on another machine), as it would be possible to stream files over the network.

Like you, I eventually intend to use a remote and LCD to control it although I haven't got around to getting the necessary components (an LCD panel such as <a href="http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=36389&doy=2m8">this one</a> available from Maplins and components to build an IR receiver). For the software side of it you could use <a href="http://www.lirc.org/">LIRC</a> and <a href="http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/">LCDProc</a>, both of which are easily installable in Debian via apt-get and there's lots of documentation available on their respective sites.

Hope this helps.

1337_penguin

Thanks that's exactly the kind of help I needed . I have found the LIRC site and ordered some parts to build the serial port receiver, and thanks for the link to maplin, need to go there to buy some stuff for the IR module!

Samba would work so much better, but so far all my attempts at getting it working have failed. How excatly do I make Samba share the music directory on my machine?

Thanks so much, this is really going to get my project going

Oh yea thanks Agrouf, I looked it up and that is a bit more than what I was looking for, I just want music capabilities and I'd like to do a bit more of the work myself .

I forgot to mention that lol, sorry about the double post guys.

This isn't exactly what you are looking for but maybe it gives you new ideas to get where you want...

I have set up a pc to use as a simple media center and hooked it up with my tv. I'm running mpd and gmpc to play the music. I started looking into getting a IR-remote to work with this but felt that it was to much hassle so instead I bought a bluetooth dongle and now control the whole lot with my phone. It's very convenient as I can be anywhere in my apartment and control the play back.

This of cours may not suit you as you (as I understand) want a headless device. Anyway, this works for me

That's a really good idea. How exactly do you use your phone to control it, do you have special software on it? Yeah, I do want my device to be headless, not enough inputs on my TV you see. I have the machine doing security updates on boot, and if all fails I can telnet it .

I have now finally got samba running and working .

I'm just waiting on the stuff to get my IR module up and running, once that is working I think I'm going to do the parallel port LCD display mod, and hopefully code myself a simple menu system using the remote and the panel.

Thanks for all the ideas so far

Sonyericsson phones (I'm sure others too) supports remote controlling of applications on a computer. I think a few pre-installed templates are ther to eg control the desktop i Windows, powerpoint presentations etc.

It's very easy to create you own templates though to get it working with eg mplayer or gmpc. All you need is the bluetooth libraries installed and you'll be up and running with this in no time. I'm not too sure that this would work without X though...

Interesting, but I haven't figured out how to get the phone & the computer(s) to "see" each other w/ bluetooth.

The phone is an SE 600i & the boxen run SimplyMEPIS 3.3.2 & 6.0. KDE of course. Zoom BT USB dongle.

Any pointers to a tutorial/HOWTO for someone w/ reasonable Linux experience but nearly 0 clue about bluetooth?