Stream laptop output to musicbox

Hi there!
I have been using musicbox on my new raspberry for a couple of days now and I love it so far.
What I’m trying to accomplish at the moment is to stream all my laptop (ubunbtu 14.10) audio output to musicbox via DLNA/UPnP.

On my former setup with raspbian it was pretty easy to set up using pulseaudio and following this tutorial: Link

Since musicbox already has DLNA integration I thought it might be best to give this a try. After a little while on google I came up with this: Link
So following this tutorial I think that my Laptop is now working as a DLNAServer streaming all soundoutput.

The Question is how do I make musicbox recognize and use this stream?At one point the tutorial suggests to:

" Connect your player to the DLNA device which should have appeared
(probably as GstLaunch) and you should hear any audio played on your
computer through your DLNA device."

Could anyone point me in the right direction to get this working with musicbox since I can’t find an option to chose a device.

As far as I know, Musicbox only has a dlna/upnp renderer, it needs to be told what to do by a controller (such a bubbleupnp for android). With something like bubbleupnp you should be able to select the server (your laptop) and renderer (musicbox) you want to use. Having said all that, musicbox changed from using gmediarender to upmpdcli in v0.5.1 beta and I’ve not personally tried it since then.

thanks a lot!
so now I installed GuPnP AV Controllpoint and actually was able to choose rygels Gst Launch Stream (as mentioned in the tutorial I posted above). After starting playback I actually got sound through musicbox for about 5 seconds. After that it was gone. Haven’t been able to get sound ever since…
Well but that seems to be the right direction.

Hi,

another way would be to use SongCast. With that you can apparently also stream your sound output to a SongCast receiver. The receiver part needs to be added to the musicbox system, It is basically an extension to the upmpdcli component that is included in musicbox already.

I wanted to try it out but could not get it to work with the given documentation:

Jochen

Thanks! But google tells me that apparently Soundcast is Windows and Mac only or am I missing something?

Nope, you are correct and pulseaudio is probably the only option. Since you did get a few seconds of sound you can’t be too far off. Are you using a wired connection?

I’m using a wired connection for my laptop and wireless for the pi…
Just tried to stream mp3 sound from my android phone to musicbox via BubbleUPnP. That at least worked fine despite both devices using wifi. So maybe I’m just dealing with an compression issue since my rygel configuration turns the stream into flac output…hmm.
As soon as I get home I’ll do some troubleshooting.

Perhaps it’s that, it’s certainly a good idea to use whatever format gives the pi the least work possible to do.

Figured it out! So it was an compression issue… switching to wave encoding solved the problem. As soon as I find the time I’ll post the complete setup… thanks for all the help!

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Hey,
to quickly return to my previous post: yes, SongCast does not seem to be supporting your platform.
Just came across a different solution though that might be interesting for others: Asset UPnP DLNA (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/asset-upnp-dlna.htm)

Basically, it is a DLNA server that also allows you to stream your sound output via UPNP just like a web radio station.
It’s available for WIndows, Mac, Debian, Raspberry and QNAP.
Unfortunately, it is not free, though.

Looks nice actually…wish the trial version had the stream pc audio card feature. It’s a little risky for me to spend 25 € for something that might not work for me…

On Windows you can use:

http://www.streamwhatyouhear.com/

to capture the audio output and send it via UPnP. It’s free and works fine except for a delay of a few seconds.

Seeing as musicbox has Shairport included, can’t you just install this on your computer? - http://tuneblade.com/
I use it all the time, and have no issues, no need to install anything extra on the Pi. Having said that, I am still running pimusicbox 0.5 until the Shairport issue is fixed with version 0.5.2.

The OP wanted to stream his Ubuntu (not Windows) laptop output. It’s great
that there’s no need to install anything extra on musicbox with any of
these methods. Pulseaudio on an Ubuntu laptop should be perfectly capable
of sending audio for playback on musicbox’s airplay or upnp interfaces so
you should be able to try both methods pretty easily; the guide at
http://westmarch.sjsoft.com/2014/04/streaming-audio-linux-to-raspbmc/ might
be helpful. But if using shairport means you need to stick to older
versions of musicbox then it’s probably better to use upnp, for now.

Hi @Michael_Michaelsen I would love to know the setup you finally arrived at. Please do post if you get the chance.

Thanks!

I’m using the shairport-sync musicbox feature with pulseaudio/raop2 on linux. The latest commit for pulseaudio/raop2 resolved my last issues with stutter. Sadly I had to update the shairport-sync package on the musicbox manually with the instructions on it’s github page. You have to install a gcc and make and resolve some conflicts but it’s straight-forward. And you can do it all as root.
Or you can just use musicbox version 5 until shairport-sync is updated.
Pulseaudio/raop2 is awesome. I hope it will be merged into mainline pulseaudio some day. It’s stable enough right now.

I will update shairport-sync in the next version

I want to add to this thread that there is also this:
https://github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dlna/tree/master/debian
Tested on Debian Jessie/gnome with pulse. In many ways even better than rygel.

if you use ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/~qos/+archive/ubuntu/pulseaudio-dlna

the latency on these is always quite large. if you need something that has low latency I suggest you check out Soundwire. Tweaking the buffers with it I was able to achiece almost non-existent latency. It has a RPi version. Obviously you need to install it on the PiMusicBox.

I want to stream music from a Windows PC.
Streamwhatyouhear didn’t work for me, so I just use windows media player.
Enable uPnP/DLNa on the pimusicbox.
Then in windows media player select ‘play to’ and select ‘musicbox’ to stream the music.
This way you can add a single song, or an entire playlist.