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Slackware Cloud Server Series, Episode 11: Jukebox Audio Streaming
Quoting: Slackware Cloud Server Series, Episode 11: Jukebox Audio Streaming – Alien Pastures —
I am an avid music lover. My tastes are eclectic; I enjoy electronic, industrial, punk, new wave, reggae and dub but also baroque and classical music. I used to tape my own music cassettes when I was young, sharing my mixes with friends. I have hundreds of vinyl albums and at many more compact discs. But technology kept evolving and I switched to MP3 files that I could store on my computer and play using VideoLAN VLC for instance. But I also want to be able to just listen to my music in the living room without operating a laptop and for that, I setup a streaming server that acts as a jukebox, continuously picking random songs from my collection and playing them from a queue that never empties. In the living room I have a Denon AVR-X2300W which can pick up the network stream. I have been running this audio streaming server for decades. First using OTTO, then Calliope and then coming back to OTTO after it had re-invented itself. But Calliope and OTTO are no longer maintained and quite tricky to setup in the first place. I am not looking forward to migrate this unsupported setup to Slackware 15.1 when that gets released and I move my server to it.
I went on a search for a modern, maintained and open source alternative for my OTTO server. I have actually setup Mopidy with Pibox extension to get the jukebox functionality. Recompiling Slackware’s gst-plugins-good package against libshout enables the libgstshout2.so library which gives us ‘shout2send‘ which then streams audio from Mopidy to my Icecast server. Setting it all up was not trivial and I did not like how the Pibox extension handled the queue autofill. I went on with my search for a good OTTO alternative and I hope I found it.