Whole House Media Player

I love music but I tend to zip in and out of rooms while working around the house. I'm just never in one room long enough to put on music and enjoy it while I do a task. To combat this I made sure to include an 8x8 audio matrix in my automation system; which has been sitting idle until today.

I decided to do a little research and find a headless media player that allow me to remotely control audio being played from a Raspberry Pi via a web browser. I found two good options; PiMusicbox and RuneAudio. I had an older Raspberry Pi B+ unit in the drawer so I opted to go with RuneAudio since they had an SD card image for this model.

I downloaded the image and wrote it to the SD card with USB Image Tool (via the instructions on RuneAudio's website). I put the card in the Raspberry Pi, logged into my router to find the IP address. It identified itself in the distribution list as Rune Audio which was a big help. Then I opened Firefox and hit the IP address. Bam! There it was. Rune Audio's interface.

The next step was to make a Rune Audio user account on my NAS and set it for read only access to my music library. Then I added the music libraries to the Rune interface. Once I did this I browsed to the the player and started playing music. I have never had something like this work so easily before.

The final steps were to connect the Pi to one of the inputs on my 8x8 audio matrix. Then I sat at the living room touchpanel and opened the browser. I navigated to the IP address and everything worked beautifully.

The last step was to modify the Crestron touchpanel files to automatically load the IP address for the media player. Then I made a few UI tweaks and that's it. 3 hours of time and I have a media player that I can hear in various rooms in the house and control from all the touchpanels. I can't believe how easy of a project this was.