I have a not-quite-vintage SA-PM31 radio/CD player/cassette player – it’s a mini HiFi type arrangement, and I bought it in the early 2000’s; my grandparents were visiting, and memory says that Grandad offered to buy me a radio as a present (potentially related to my first paying job after college, but my memory is really hazy about that bit). It’s still working just fine, though if I was to look at the cassette head, I’m sure I’d find one that would disappoint Matthew Taylor of Techmoan fame.
One useful feature is it has aux input. I have a Pi Zero with an iQAudio DACZero. I don’t remember why I bought that DAC, but I suppose I was thinking about hooking this kind of thing up before. So, I need a way to feed the aux input of the stereo with all the music that I have on the NAS in my living room. It turns out that there are a few projects for this, and most of them seem to be based on mpd; I settled on trying out moOde.
Installation is simple
- download the zip file of the release,
- use the Raspi image writer to write out the SD card,
- connect a WiFi dongle to the Zero using an adapter (since the Zero doesn’t have regular sized ports),
- boot the Pi,
- connect to the AP that moOde starts up by default if it has no network connection,
- access the web UI at hxxp://moode/,
- reconfigure the network settings to use my house WiFi,
- reboot,
- access the web UI at hxxp://moode/ again.
At this point it’s a case of setting up the library to read from my NAS; the scan functionality (for shares) didn’t work, but it was easy enough to add the vault manually and set the SMB version to 3. Then sit back for a few hours while mpd indexes 17,000ish songs.
I basically want this setup to behave like a radio feed; a very eclectic radio feed to be sure as it switches from Bob Marley to Dido to J.S. Bach to Yoko Kanno. moOde has built-in support for ashuffle, but I’ve found it to be a little lacking. The default operation is to just execute ashuffle with some arguments, throw the output away, and put it in the background with &. This leads to a frustrating experience when the ashuffle binary has a problem, because the web UI doesn’t monitor it at all, so if ashuffle has stopped running due to a bug in a library you don’t get any new songs in the queue. The web UI also appears to have problems starting ashuffle up after a reboot – some code path or another isn’t being called correctly I suspect – my debug writes to a file in /tmp don’t appear, even though I’m modding the startAutoShuffle() and stopAutoShuffle() methods (and restarting both nginx and php-fpm to be sure).
It so happens that ashuffle has a contrib example of how to set up a systemd-based “daemon” for ashuffle, so I’ve gone that route. Slightly modified to execute “mpc search filename NAS” and pipe that to ashuffle, and then run ashuffle with “-n” to avoid the libmpdclient problem with response sizes.
[Unit]
Description=Shuffle service for mpd
Requires=mpd.service
After=mpd.service
[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "/usr/bin/mpc search filename 'NAS' | /usr/local/bin/ashuffle -n --queue-buffer 2 --file -"
[Install]
WantedBy=default.targetWith this arrangement, moOde does not have to be configured to use ashuffle; it just works when you set playback to Consume (tells mpd to remove the played item from the queue after playing).
The Pi, its hat, and the WiFi dongle 
moOde’s main playback view
Now all I need is a workshop to put the radio and the Pi in, a case for the Pi, and perhaps some GPIO-hooked buttons for play/pause/next. The radio itself will provide volume control.