So this week I bought a cheap Android tablet, specifically to allow me to read books upon the move and listen to music at home.
Currently my desktop PC has a bunch of music on it, and I listen to it locally only. In my living room I have an iPOD in a dock which has identical contents.
In my bedroom? No music. This was something I wished to change.
The music on my desktop is played via mpd, and I use the sonata client to play it. I figured I could use this for my tablet, as MPD is all about remote control and similar stuff.
Unfortunately things didn't prove so easy. I found several android applications that would let me connect to my MPD server and control it, but despite several of them claiming to support streaming I couldn't make music appear upon my local tablet. (I rebuilt MPD with the lame encoder available, and used that too, to no avail).
Still if you have music in a central location and you wish to control it then the setup is trivial. (Though there is one caveat with MPD and streaming, my understanding is that you can only stream what you're playing. You cannot configure MPD to stream music and not also play it locally..)
So although it was neat to be able to control the music on my desktop host it wasn't what I wanted. Instead I had to install mediatomb to my desktop to serve the media, and use the 2player application to browse and play it.
Once I'd configured mediatomb all my music was available to my tablet. Result. Unfortunately 2player didn't play my movies, for that purposes I needed to use bubbleupnp. But that was a trivial install too.
So? End result. I have a toy tablet for <£100 which will stream my music to the bedroom.
ObQuote: "How about this: I work for you; in exchange, you teach me how to clean. " - Léon
Tags: android, mediatomb, streaming 11 comments