Use Pi Musicbox for streming a live Radio Broadcast stream in different rooms in a school

Pi MusicBox
1

Hello,
I am a teacher in a local college in Germany and I want to realize a campus radio in our school. For the signal distribution I am planning to create a Live signal stream from the Broadcast Pc and want to stream this one to two till three raspberry pies, equipped with Pi Musicbox. So far so good, the first setup was a success. Pi Musicbox can load the live stream and stream it to the speakers, but there are two problem I have right now.

  1. The browser gui of Pi Musicbox is a good way for noobs like me, to get things done. But is there a way to protect the browser interface with a password? In our case, every pupil who gets the idea how the signal flow works wants to edit the raspberry pie surface… not good :wink:
  2. Pi Musicbox needs one minute for booting up and one minute to playback the live stream (with autoplay which is the primarily reason why I tried to solve our situation with Pi Musicbox) => 2 Minutes until the stream works, thats good. But only when the radio live stream is already broadcasting. When the music box is first online and tries to playback the stream from autoplay and after that the stream from the RadioLive Pc comes up, theres is no chance for playback the signal, until you push the Stream manually on.
  3. The distribution to the RasPies should be totally automated trough a timer, which switches the power to the units two minutes bevor the live stream starts and then the pupils turn the broadcast machines on and start the radio show => It would be very helpful if the music box could “search” for that autoplay stream so long till the stream is available. Can I solve this trough the Musicbox config?

Sorry for my bad english, I hope you you understand what I want.
Greetings form Germany,
Knut Blancke

2

  1. The system hasn’t really been designed to be locked down like that. It is technically possible but requires quite a bit of effort on your part and is rather non trivial.

  2. There has been some talk of having the system retry streams in some conditions, but the way we’ve been looking at doing it wouldn’t solve your problem :frowning:

  3. Not really.

My best suggestion, though not quite as noob friendly would be to take a clean rasbpian install and do the following

  • Install mplayer by running sudo apt-get install mplayer
  • Then run sudo nano /etc/rc.local and add the line mplayer -loop 0 http://example.com/replace/this/with/your/stream &
  • Now reboot with sudo reboot

When the PI comes back up it will start the media player in the background and try playing the stream you provided in an infinite loop. Not the most elegant, but I think this should do the trick based on what you explained :smile:

See http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/linux/usage/rc-local.md for info on how rc.local works.