Broadcasting vinyl over my LAN - ALSA2ChromeCast

Previously, on the Terence Eden Adventures:

• I accidentally won a load of vinyl on eBay, and
• I bought the cheapest record player I could find.

The record player has USB output. So I shoved it into a Rock Pi S - an SBC similar to a Raspberry Pi - to broadcast vinyl all over my house via ChromeCast! Here's how.

Detect the audio

Install alsa-utils if they're not already present.

Find your hardware with

 BASHarecord -l

One of the outputs should be:

 BASHcard 2: Microphone [USB Microphone], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]

  Subdevices: 1/1

  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

In this case, we want Hardware Card 2, Device 0. From now on, we'll refer to this as hw:2,0. Yours may be different.

Record a sample from the input. Make sure the record player is playing music!

 BASHarecord  --device="hw:2,0" -d 10 -f dat -t wav test.wav

That will record a 10 second WAV file at the best possible audio resolution. Check that it has worked by playing back the WAV on a different computer.

Install Icecast

Icecast is a terrible bit of software with no sensible user documentation or guide. Install it with:

 BASHsudo apt install icecast2

It should prompt you for some information. And then it will start in the background automagically. If not, run:

 BASH/etc/init.d/icecast2 start

You can edit the default config with:

 BASHsudo nano /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml

Here's a minimal config. This The admin username is admin and all the passwords are password - you probably want to change that! The hostname is set to the IP address of the Pi, 192.168.0.123:

 XML<icecast>

    <hostname>192.168.0.123</hostname>

    <location>Earth</location>

    <admin>icemaster@localhost</admin>

    <limits>

        <clients>100</clients>

        <sources>2</sources>

        <queue-size>524288</queue-size>

        <client-timeout>30</client-timeout>

        <header-timeout>15</header-timeout>

        <source-timeout>10</source-timeout>

        <burst-on-connect>1</burst-on-connect>

        <burst-size>65535</burst-size>

    </limits>

    <authentication>

        <source-password>password</source-password>

        <relay-password>password</relay-password>

        <admin-user>admin</admin-user>

        <admin-password>password</admin-password>

    </authentication>

    <listen-socket>

        <port>8000</port>

    </listen-socket>

    <http-headers>

        <header name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*"/>

    </http-headers>

    <fileserve>1</fileserve>

    <paths>

        <basedir>/usr/share/icecast2</basedir>

        <logdir>/var/log/icecast2</logdir>

        <webroot>/usr/share/icecast2/web</webroot>

        <adminroot>/usr/share/icecast2/admin</adminroot>

        <alias source="/" destination="/status.xsl"/>

    </paths>

    <logging>

        <accesslog>access.log</accesslog>

        <errorlog>error.log</errorlog>

        <loglevel>3</loglevel>

        <logsize>10000</logsize>

    </logging>

    <security>

        <chroot>0</chroot>

    </security>

</icecast>

To restart after making changes, run:

 BASH/etc/init.d/icecast2 restart

If you visit http://your_server_ip:8000 then you should see a boring interface. You can't do anything with it yet.

Install Ice2

Icecast is a server - but you also need a client to broadcast audio to the server. Annoying that Icecast doesn't come with one. And annoying that there's no tutorial to tell you all this.

 BASHsudo apt install ice2

I followed this tutorial. Basically, create a file called ice.xml with this in it:

 XML<ices>

    <stream>

        <input>

            <module>alsa</module>

            <param name="rate">48000</param>

            <param name="channels">2</param>

            <param name="device">hw:2,0</param>

        </input>

        <metadata>

            <name>@edent's record player</name>

            <genre>Live Vinyl</genre>

            <description>Listen to what's on my record player</description>

            <url>http://192.168.0.123:8000</url>

        </metadata>

        <instance>

            <hostname>192.168.0.123</hostname>

            <port>8000</port>

            <password>password</password>

            <mount>/vinyl.ogg</mount>

            <yp>1</yp>

            <encode>

                <quality>10</quality>

                <samplerate>48000</samplerate>

                <channels>2</channels>

            </encode>

            <downmix>0</downmix>

        </instance>

    </stream>

    <background>1</background>

    <logpath>.</logpath>

    <logfile>ices.log</logfile>

    <logsize>2048</logsize>

    <loglevel>4</loglevel>

    <consolelog>0</consolelog>

</ices>

Now run ices2 ice.xml - it will run in the background.

The admin page of Icecast should now have something like this: You can now play the audio via the HTML5 player on the page - or open the M3U in VLC.

ChromeCast Broadcast

For my home AV set-up, the easiest way to broadcast audio to my amp is to use its built-in ChromeCast Audio.

There are loads of solutions, but the easiest to use was PyChromeCast. Once installed, it can stream audio from IceCast to a ChromeCast. Bit convoluted, but it works!

To discover ChromeCasts on your network, run python3 then enter these commands:

 Python 3import time

import pychromecast

pychromecast.discovery.discover_chromecasts()

You'll get a list of ChromeCasts on your network. Mine showed:

[('192.168.0.789', 4321, UUID('5632e20d-1030-4885-ad3d-496504b7c820'), 'Pioneer VSX-933', 'Pioneer VSX-933 ABC1234')]

We want the ChromeCast's ID - which is the 4 digit int. Back to Python

 Python 3pychromecast.get_chromecasts(4321)

You'll get a bit more debug data:

[Chromecast('192.168.0.789', port=4321, device=DeviceStatus(friendly_name='Pioneer VSX-933 ABC1234', model_name='Pioneer VSX-933', manufacturer='Onkyo And Pioneer', uuid=UUID('5632e20d-1030-4885-ad3d-496504b7c820'), cast_type='cast'))]

This supports cast - good!

Now we can send the audio to the ChromeCast

 Python 3cast = pychromecast.get_chromecasts(4321)[0]

cast.wait()

mc = cast.media_controller

mc.play_media('http://192.168.0.123:8000/vinyl.ogg', 'audio/ogg')

Success! Vinyl ➡️ USB ➡️ ALSA ➡️ IceCast ➡️ Ogg ➡️ Ethernet ➡️ WiFi ➡️ ChromeCast ➡️ Speakers.

Is it worth it?

Depends. Do you like lossy, crackly vinyl, smushed down to OGG, flown across a network, then digitally reprocessed into luscious 5.1 surround sound with a 4.5 second lag?

Meh.