Simultaneous playing on multiple clients?

OzarkCDN

New Member
Hi all - just checking out the RPi uses for serving / client use, and want to check if this is the right way to go or not. I have an office where I want to play music on a couple different stereo clients at the same time (to avoid interference between players). Right now, I have an ancient ipod shuffle that has been playing 24/7 for years the same few hundred songs, and it's fine, but can't get it to stream to another area of the office that also needs music. There are several bluetooth options, but I think there would be too many drop-outs of data so wanted to find an easier way than fishing cable through the ceiling to connect two different areas!

Is it possible to use the RPi in this manner of playing on one RPi and having it also stream to another player to play simultaneously?
 
Short answer is yes. The easiest way to do it is with a logitech media server (LMS) running on a PC that has access to the music files. Then use raspberry Pi's as your clients running squeezelite. The LMS software serves up the media and syncs all the players so that the same content is played through them all.

The LMS software can be downloaded for free and there are versions for windows and for Linux.

Here's a good thread on setting up a Pi as a squeezebox clone using squeezelite. It's a little dated but I think it should still work. Feel free to message me directly or just reply to this thread if you run into any issues. I'll watch this thread and reply back if I see a question.

http://audiokarma.org/forums/index....music-a-raspberry-pi-squeezebox-clone.554156/
 
Thanks for the reply - reason I was hoping to use the Pi as a server is so I wouldn't have to rely on a computer to serve (since we don't have one that is here full time).. thus hoping I could use Pi to serve
 
Ahhh... OK... you probably can use one as a music server too. I tried running LMS on one once but it was the first version of a Pi and nowhere near as powerful as the current version. It couldn't keep up with the processing requirements. For me it made more sense to use the PC as I already had it on and running all the time as a video media server.

Basically, you would just run the LMS software (Linux version) on the Pi and you could use other Pi's as clients.

Here's a link to a site that details how to run LMS on a Pi

http://raspberry-at-home.com/logitech-media-server/
 
Just to make sure I'm leading you down the best path... give me all the details on what you want to accomplish. There's lots of ways to skin this cat.

What I need to know are things like where is the music stored? (thumb drive, network, internet streaming). How many locations? On the same network? What devices will produce the sound? (Receivers, amp, cell phone, computer). Do you want the same content playing at every location synced or just have access to music so that each location can choose what song is playing?
 
Maybe install a repeater on your current system to give you the range required to hit the other areas that are giving you problems? Allows you to keep things simple and work with what you know.

As far as sticking with your years old playlist ... it's not like you're missing much ... <G>
 
I would think the repeater would only help with WiFi and it seems like bluetooth was his wireless option.

For the simplest solution I would buy two Pi's. Run volumio on them both and use two local thumb drives to store the music. Plug one thumb drive into each Pi and you're basically done.

Here's a link to the latest volumio image for Pi:
https://volumio.org/get-started

1. Use software like this https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ to burn the image you downloaded from the link above to a microSD card.
2. Plug in the microSD card and thumbdrive to the Pi
3. Power on the Pi.
4. Follow instructions from the volumio web site where you downloaded the image on how to control the player from a computer, phone or tablet.
5. Plug the mini-plug audio out from the Pi into an audio device (receiver, amp, powered speakers, etc).

Hardest part in this will be renaming one of the players from the default (volumio) to a different name. Here's how you do this:
Follow the steps above and get one of the players running. On the system settings via the web interface you can change the player's name to something like "office-1". Then follow the same steps for player two and change its name if you want to or just leave it as the default.

Options to improve the sound quality (if that matters here...) is to use an i2s DAC. Very easy to do, plugs into the top of the Pi and has standard RCA outputs.

In addition to the music on the thumb drive, both of the players would have access to internet streaming radio stations for some variety.
 
I think the newest RPi will have no problems being both a server and a player. Another cheap way to implement a server is to buy a used laptop. I use a Toshiba Satellite which has nothing more than a Celeron running at 2.2GHz in it. It is plenty powerful to run LMS. I suggest using Linux on these old laptops because they just run much faster under linux than Windows.

I have an RPi as a player along with two laptops and a pogoplug. Lately I have been going with used laptops as players instead of buying new RPis. For $50 bucks you get a more powerful computer, a screen and a keyboard. Of course, you have to not mind having a laptop next to your stereo. The RPi and pogoplug are really small and can even be hidden. I can run all 4 players playing the same song simultaneously or each one playing a different song or any combination in between.

Here are the results of calculating prime numbers up to 20,000 using sysbench for a RPi and a laptop:

Quad Core Pi (all four cores used) at 1GHz: 177s
OS = Raspian Jessie

Celeron (single core) at 2.2GHz: 40s
OS = Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS

Food for thought.
 
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I think the newest RPi will have no problems being both a server and a player. Another cheap way to implement a server is to buy a used laptop. I use a Toshiba Satellite which has nothing more than a Celeron running at 2.2GHz in it. It is plenty powerful to run LMS. I suggest using Linux on these old laptops because they just run much faster under linux than Windows.

I have an RPi as a player along with two laptops and a pogoplug. Lately I have been going with used laptops as players instead of buying new RPis. For $50 bucks you get a more powerful computer, a screen and a keyboard. Of course, you have to not mind having a laptop next to your computer. The RPi and pogoplug are really small and can even be hidden. I can run all 4 players playing the same song simultaneously or each one playing a different song or any combination in between.

I think LMS might be the easiest try since I already have a couple of old laptops that I have ubuntu setup on (sounds like I can install LMS on unbuntu). I didn't know that LMS clients could play simultaneously the same file, to avoid areas between the two stereos from sonic interference.

In reality, the simplest solution would be difficult to do, and that would be to just have a line level audio output to the other stereo amp / speaker system.

I also have a couple of very old iphones (3gs and 4s) that I was thinking of using, but couldn't see a way to get them to simultaneously play the same track off of a itunes server either.
 
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Here's what I would do given that you've got a laptop with Linux on it already.

Run LMS on that laptop with the music files you want to serve.

Run two RPi's with squeezelite clients into some amplified devices.

Use the phones to control the clients if you want to skip songs or something.
 
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