Project idea: FreeBSD-Kirkwood as a headless jukebox.

2010-09-16 13:09

FreeBSD-Kirkwood’s kernel supports sound through the snd_uaudio driver and is simple to set up as a music-playing device.

Hardware

Any USB audio hardware that works with snd_uaudio should be plug-and-play compatible with FreeBSD-Kirkwood. I had success with a Sound Blaster X-Fi USB borrowed from a friend, but I’ve not been able to test any other hardware.

Bare Seagate Dockstar board connected via USB to a Sound Blastic X-Fi and a set of 2.1 computer speakers.

/dev/dsp0 and /dev/mixer should be created automatically when the audio device is initialized.

Software

My favorite music-playing daemon is, well, Music Player Daemon. I maintain a musicpd package for FreeBSD-Kirkwood, so if your PACKAGESITE is set correctly a simple pkg_add -r musicpd should install it. If local playback isn’t desired, MPD can stream over a network through Icecast2, also available as a package.

Once set up, MPD is controllable through any number of frontends running on a remote computer or through a web-based one running on the device itself.

Video

Lastly, a poor-quality video of my Dockstar playing music: