Streaming music from PC to stereo

Evening gents. This is a sort of conundrum I am facing. I have recently discovered Pandora internet radio and lets just say I think we have our answer to the question of "next generation" music delivery. Let me be clear here. I do not download or rip music from the web. First up, I don't think you can from Pandora anyway, I don't care to so need no instruction about it, and I am REALLY enjoying the fact that I have a Celtic music "channel" now instead of fiddling with broadcast NPR on Sundays trying to find The Thistle and Shamrock. As far as I can tell, this is completely legit internet radio service so no worries there. However, sitting in front of a pc for hours just to listen to radio is a pain. So I am trying to fish around the net to find a reasonable way to use my wireless router to stream the sound from my PC to my stereo in the living room.

Now I may have posted about one non solution last year. I found the Linksys WMB54G wireless music bridge on closeout at Best Buy for $29. Hooryay! It had wireless/wired connectivity, both types of digital audio out as well as regular old L-R analog composite outputs. Can't miss I thought. A cheap, easy way to get the sound from the pc to the stereo. Nothing could be further from the truth! That thing was a *** from the get go. I spent HOURS poring over the net trying to find setup and connection solutions. FAT CHANCE. Even the more experienced guys on the forums that deal with this stuff chucked the thing in disgust. I concur. It would have been perfect IF it would have worked. I managed to get it connected once via ethernet cable but NEVER wireless. So I started looking again today and found a few things like Squeezebox at $400 and another brand which is supposed to be very good but starts at a thousand dollars! No way I can spend that much. Does anyone have a workable solution that is not hundreds of dollars? I even looked at another Linksys product, the Media Center Extender(s) 2100/2200 and their reviews are generally not good either. This is too good of a thing to limit to the office. Help me out. I know if you guys can go 3000 posts strong on Linux you can figure something out for me!

Regards, Todd

How far away from the PC to the stereo?

One option is to use an FM Transmitter on the output from the PC. Only problem is, most of them kinda suck unless you've got a nice range of unused airwaves. That or you potentially violate some FCC laws and boost the power output of the transmitter.

Other than that....I've kinda got nothing at the moment....

The Squeezebox is extremely neat. I'd grab the "Classic". You should be able to find it for under $300.

Pandora is completely legit. In fact, at the moment they pay higher royalty rates than any other type of legit public broadcast.

http://www.savenetradio.org/ has more information about that, if you're interested. If you really like Pandora, I recommend you check it out and see what you can do to keep them from going under.

Thanks guys. I will check the FM transmitter thing. I have an old pair of wireless headphones as well but that is not what I am after.

Spacegeezer you are so right. The whole royalties debacle is nearly criminal in my mind. Let see. The terrestrial radio broadcaster(NAB) pay ZERO royalty fees, and sat rad pays less than half of what they want net radio to pay. Doesn't sound like a conflict of interest to me. <Sarcasm off> The government should be investigating this as price gouging and price fixing for advantage to the NAB crowd. The broadcast radio world is coming to an end just as surely as the horse and buggy as a dominant force in its field. And remember, I am a horse and buggy type of guy. The next one to go the way of the dodo is satrad. I was really ready to jump on that ship last year till all this merger talk came up. As I suspected, they chopped up XM and fiddled with its deep play lists and SiriusXM is now basically FM with no ads. $13-18 per month? No thanks. Yet I now have a Celtic "station" I can listen to at any time. Enter the Haggis? No problem. The Elders? No problem. I can't get that ANYWHERE in Kansas City and the Elders are K.C. based! They play to a sold out Irish Fest here every September. I am not against terr. radio. I would tune in to a Celtic channel all the time if it were on FM but it is not and that is that. It is not financially feasible or wanted or it would be here. So why should Pandora and listeners be punished for LEGITIMATELY delivering and listening to content? Heck, I would pay for the commercial free version in a minute if I had WiMax delivery to my vehicles. I can't wait for the day when you go to best buy and purchase a DIN unit for your car and one of the STANDARD options is a wifi/wimax receiver built in. It sounds as if WiMax is going to be the wireless broadband standard and once the metro areas are covered, terr. rad and their horrid play lists are in big trouble.

Regards, Todd

I saw the Squeezebox Classic on a famous site named after a big river for about $200, fyi.

Can you send different audio streams to different devices? I really don't want email beeps coming over a stereo.

Via my FM Transmitter suggestion, you'd just get whatever is coming out of the sound card....beeps and all. It has its cons, but can be done fairly cheap.

If you're stereo is part of your home theater setup, a Tivo could be an option as well....you can use it as a media server (of sorts) so that it pulls off the hard drive; but I've never tried it with streaming audio.

Todd,

Do you have an older computer or laptop hanging around that you don't use anymore? I helped my roommate take a laptop with a broken display and turn it into a remotely-controlled interface to our living room stereo. All it needs is a network connection and an 1/8"-to-RCA adapter and you're ready to go.

mr_economy said:

Todd,

Do you have an older computer or laptop hanging around that you don't use anymore? I helped my roommate take a laptop with a broken display and turn it into a remotely-controlled interface to our living room stereo. All it needs is a network connection and an 1/8"-to-RCA adapter and you're ready to go.

Click to expand...

How very...'economical'... of you

What did you use for the interface on that kind of setup? I'm envisioning some nifty kind of OS and/or serial bus based display or something....

mr_economy said:

Todd,

Do you have an older computer or laptop hanging around that you don't use anymore? I helped my roommate take a laptop with a broken display and turn it into a remotely-controlled interface to our living room stereo. All it needs is a network connection and an 1/8"-to-RCA adapter and you're ready to go.

Click to expand...

Hi Kyle. I tried to respond to this the other day but evidently did not hit the "go" button. What are you doing in France? You do know the 'Hawks started the regular season of bball this week? They landed a big time point guard this week as well. Elijah Johnson. I think he is 6' 2" and supposedly is one of these wonder guards like you have seen at Memphis the last couple of years. I hope he works out.

I like your idea about the old laptop as a remote interface for streaming music to the tele or stereo. How did you do this? I understand that most have wifi built in so there is your network connection part solved instantly. How did you remote control it? Did you just use the line out jack to your rca jacks on the stereo? This is a good idea because there is always someone with a laptop laying around that has a damaged display. You can buy these things cheap as dirt. Thanks.

Regards, Todd

I haven't done it myself, but I know there are projects out there that run on top of Linux and provide a web interface. You just log in from another computer on the network and it shows you a web page with all of your music, from which you choose a subset of music to play, a particular playlist, shuffle, whatever, and just let it go until you want to choose something else.

Here's an option. Use Airfoil to stream Pandora through an Airport Express. I have an Airport Express and can say it works great to stream music from my PC (using itunes). There is a Windows version as well.

Phog Allen said:

Hi Kyle. I tried to respond to this the other day but evidently did not hit the "go" button. What are you doing in France? You do know the 'Hawks started the regular season of bball this week? They landed a big time point guard this week as well. Elijah Johnson. I think he is 6' 2" and supposedly is one of these wonder guards like you have seen at Memphis the last couple of years. I hope he works out.

I like your idea about the old laptop as a remote interface for streaming music to the tele or stereo. How did you do this? I understand that most have wifi built in so there is your network connection part solved instantly. How did you remote control it? Did you just use the line out jack to your rca jacks on the stereo? This is a good idea because there is always someone with a laptop laying around that has a damaged display. You can buy these things cheap as dirt. Thanks.

Regards, Todd

Click to expand...

Hi Todd,

I'm here in France until the end of April 2009 as an English teaching assistant at a local high school. It's serving as a gap year between undergrad and graduate school, plus a way to cement my fluency in French while earning some money to do so. I've been following KU sports, and after this unfortunate football season I'm more than ready to see what basketball has in store.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I can watch many of the football and basketball games through the European version of ESPN360, and for those that aren't covered by 360 I can connect to my friend's Slingbox to watch. But the 7-hour time difference and the fact that I work many mornings will make it difficult to watch evening games. As a side note, listening to the Chiefs online radio stream has been an entirely new experience in disappointment.

As far as the laptop-stereo interface is concerned, we stayed with a fairly basic setup. The laptop already had a working install of Windows XP, so we connected an external monitor and just installed a program called RealVNC, which enables remote desktop management. You set a password on the "host" machine (the stereo laptop), and drag the VNC application into the Startup folder in the Start menu to make sure it runs on boot. I think you can also make VNC a Windows Service, which is a more effective way of integrating it with a Windows boot, but I haven't really messed with this much. You'll also want to set Windows to automatically log in a certain user just in case the machine ever restarts.

Then you install and use the VNC client on whichever computers you want to use to manage the host machine. You'll just need to know the password and IP address of the host machine (can be a bit of a pain to find unless you statically assign because it may change from time to time with DHCP) to connect and manage it as if you were sitting at its own keyboard. Of course all this depends on connecting an external monitor for the initial setup, but many laptops with broken displays still have a video-out connection that works.

As for connecting the laptop, we just used the standard line-out connected to the stereo through an 1/8"-to-RCA adapter. If you wanted top-level sound output you could plunk down the dough for a decent USB sound card, but with my basic stereo system I never would have noticed enough difference in quality to make this worth doing.

Hope this helps, and if you're watching the game tonight Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

I have a Soundblaster Live! on my computer and use it to connect to 2 different stereos simultaneously. I have a Pioneer 5.1 that's dedicated to the computer with the speakers placed accordingly. I have that connected to the digital out (yellow) on my PC and it's primarily for Gaming and Netflix 'Watch it Now.' (although Watch it now isn't 5.1) Secondly, I have the 1/8" analog stereo out connected to my 'main' stereo system (Pioneer 7.1) and use that connection for streaming music... I use a 20' 'headphone extension' cable from Radio Shack (~$6) to easily connect my PC to the receiver. It's just a 1/8" stereo cable male/female, connected to a 6' 1/8" stereo to RCA cable... EASY. One final thing that's really cool about my Pioneer receiver is that it has a setting (for 2 channel audio) to upscale compressed (...as in mp3 or streaming) audio up to CD or near CD quality. As for a wireless solution, I haven't explored that yet... Switching between the two outputs (analog and digital) is controlled with the Soundblaster Live! software...

btw... My 'main' stereo is actually 7.2.4 as I have 2 subwoofers and 4 tactile transducers attached through a separate amplifier. It's amazing what you can pull of with adapters

Thanks Rob. Another wacky idea I came up with is to build a "frontend" system to use at the tv/stereo. Sort of like a Linksys Media Extender only running LinuxMint or something like that. It would contain no hard drive but a Compact Flash to SATA adapter that would run like a hdd. These are about $35 and take any CF card. This would eliminate disc spin up noise and likely reduce heat. Most Linux distros(I'm thinking LinuxMint since it plays nearly anything) will easily boot off of 8Gb or so and I think you could get one of those cards for way less than $50 nowadays. That would take care of running the system. I would want this machine to be in a small case and likely not even contain a DVD player. Just the mobo and CF/SATA adapter and power supply. 1Gig of ram would suffice for most efforts. No high def video. The biggest bugaboo is getting a mobo with analog audio and video outs directly on the board AND built in wifi AND would run a cheap processor without a fan for less noise. The heat issue is the biggest problem running fanless. The wifi would allow the unit to grab my wireless signal from router and browse the net for Pandora and videos. Setting it up to share with my XP MCE pc machine would be nice too so I could grab my mp3 collection for play as well. This would probably not be as much as buying one of those dodgy Linksys contraptions. We'll see. I hate it when these brain storms come into my mind. I think about them for days.

Regards, Todd

Phog Allen said:

Thanks Rob. Another wacky idea I came up with is to build a "frontend" system to use at the tv/stereo. Sort of like a Linksys Media Extender only running LinuxMint or something like that. It would contain no hard drive but a Compact Flash to SATA adapter that would run like a hdd. These are about $35 and take any CF card. This would eliminate disc spin up noise and likely reduce heat. Most Linux distros(I'm thinking LinuxMint since it plays nearly anything) will easily boot off of 8Gb or so and I think you could get one of those cards for way less than $50 nowadays. That would take care of running the system. I would want this machine to be in a small case and likely not even contain a DVD player. Just the mobo and CF/SATA adapter and power supply. 1Gig of ram would suffice for most efforts. No high def video. The biggest bugaboo is getting a mobo with analog audio and video outs directly on the board AND built in wifi AND would run a cheap processor without a fan for less noise. The heat issue is the biggest problem running fanless. The wifi would allow the unit to grab my wireless signal from router and browse the net for Pandora and videos. Setting it up to share with my XP MCE pc machine would be nice too so I could grab my mp3 collection for play as well. This would probably not be as much as buying one of those dodgy Linksys contraptions. We'll see. I hate it when these brain storms come into my mind. I think about them for days.

Regards, Todd

Click to expand...

I think a small case and a heatsink on a cpu are going to be the most difficult things to get to work together.

On the other hand, you could go full-on and build a nice little HTPC very cheaply these days, very cheaply and even with magnetic disks, very quietly.

Phog Allen said:

Thanks Rob. Another wacky idea I came up with is to build a "frontend" system to use at the tv/stereo.

Click to expand...

Some may refer to this as an Ipod!

ShaneC said:

How very...'economical'... of you

What did you use for the interface on that kind of setup? I'm envisioning some nifty kind of OS and/or serial bus based display or something....

Click to expand...

Nah, sounds like the broken laptop just sits next to the receiver and dumps audio output to it.

It would then run a custom server or just use VNC to allow a remote system to jack in and effectively control the otherwise-unusable laptop.

Not to detract from the OP's accomplishment: it's still a great hack, and I used to do almost exactly that myself before I ran MythTV.

Rorschuck said:

Nah, sounds like the broken laptop just sits next to the receiver and dumps audio output to it.

It would then run a custom server or just use VNC to allow a remote system to jack in and effectively control the otherwise-unusable laptop.

Not to detract from the OP's accomplishment: it's still a great hack, and I used to do almost exactly that myself before I ran MythTV.

Click to expand...

Yep that's it. Not beautiful or elegant, but for two college students like us it was a perfect use of otherwise neglected hardware.

Rorschuck said:

Nah, sounds like the broken laptop just sits next to the receiver and dumps audio output to it.

It would then run a custom server or just use VNC to allow a remote system to jack in and effectively control the otherwise-unusable laptop.

Not to detract from the OP's accomplishment: it's still a great hack, and I used to do almost exactly that myself before I ran MythTV.

Click to expand...

Just one more bump to this post. I have looked at the MythTv solution a few times. It sounds great. Now if I do the laptop or frontend thing, would one of the Myth distros like Mythbuntu be good choice for the OS? I ask because even though I only really need it now for streaming audio wireless, it would be a nice thing to have learn a bit about the pvr functions of Myth as well. Of course with no tv tuner or dvd player in the case, you really couldn't do much with it. Just thinking again.

Regards, Todd