Hi, I’ve been doing some reading re: setting up Musicbox as a wireless server to play music files from my laptop. Unfortunately my macbook is a pre-2011 model and does not support the airplay protocol. So I have been researching methods on streaming and haven’t been able to sort out a simple method of doing this. Is a shared network folder the way to go about this? Or is there a method using UPnP? What would be the simplest way to achieve this?
Appreciate any answer or point to a relevant thread!
Setting up a shared folder and allowing Musicbox to mount and scan it will give the best experience as all the music will be fully discoverable (i.e. searching, browsing) from both MPD clients and the web UI. If you have a very large music collection, an initial scan will take a long time over the network and some people have also had problems getting the share to mount (usually just a case of using the correct mount options, see other threads on here). You’d also need to rescan every time you add/remove music, either manually or by rebooting. However, these subsequent scans will be much quicker.
Upnp requires you to first install a UPnP media server on your laptop and to have a good Upnp client available. I’ve had great results using minidlna server (on Ubuntu) along with the excellent BubbleUPnP client (for Android). Once you’ve enabled upnp in Musicbox settings, you’d use BubbleUPnP (the UPnP controller) to select Musicbox as the Renderer and to select the minidlna running on your laptop as the library. You’d then be able to search/browse/queue songs through BubbleUPnP. I’m afraid I don’t know what the Apple equivalents would be but they must be out there.
Uhm, not that I know anything about the issue, but I have an ancient DuoCore MacBook (1,1) from, is it maybe 2006, and it supports airplay. So, are you really sure that your Macbook doesn’t? I don’t know what Airplay is like on more modern Apple devices, maybe you have some airplay application or menu. On this old mac on OSX 10.6.8 only in iTunes is there button where the audio output can be directed to many places, including pimusicbox. So, AFAICS there is no way to have the system mixer output all sounds to airplay or something like that. But since iTunes handles the multimedia libraries anyway it doesn’t amount to a problem of any sort IMO.
However, you should consider moving all the music away from the macbook anyway, so that you can listen to it even when the macbook is not in use. And maybe stop using Apple products 