Wireless music player with TL-WR703N
In my previous post I wrote about using TL-WR703N and testing it as a wireless music player. Now I will try to provide some observations on what was working and what not in both cases.
Honestly I spent disproportionate ammount of time trying to make work the "PulseAudio" approach. That is because it leaves many options open and provides for clean separation between the "sound generator" and the "sound player".
The setup - I was using the TL-WR703N with OpenWrt (trunk)*. Connection was over WiFi, N mode, 40MHz channel. On the other side of the connection is a TL-WDR3600. The server is directly connected to the WDR3600 over gigabit ethernet.
PulseAudio approach:
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "PulseAudio remote player"
server "pulseaudio" #server name
format "44100:16:2"
}
I was running mpd on a home server with all the music files on a disk attached to this server. Additionally I was streaming some internet radios. When listening to radios there was a small ammount of incomming traffic - compressed audio comming from the Internet, while there was a huge ammount of outgoing traffic towards the PA server running on the router.
Additionally I tried rtp with pulseaudio. That was a failure. The streams never syncronized correctly.
* Using OpenWrt trunk is a mistake :). Go for the last stable version instead.
I was using an old Lenovo notebook with a broken screen for a home server. As I wanted to have more storage than the internal HDD I used two 3.5" SATA disks attached to the computer via PCMCIA SATA controller. Was it my built or the controller or a disk, but a WD Green 2TB disk was developing problems in the ext4 filesystem. Seemengly at random. Because I had my /home and my /var/www on this disk, that led to so many problems that it drived me nuts. Several times. 