Raspberry Pi as headless audio player

peter_b · Post by **peter_b** » Tue Dec 26, 2017 3:58 am

HowTo setup a raspberry pi (v2) as a headless audio playback device in the LAN:

1) Install Raspbian Stretch image on Raspberry Pi

2) Install Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd):
In order to make sure that the time on the RPi is correct, install the NTP daemon:

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$ sudo apt-get install ntp

3) Install MPD:

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$ sudo apt-get install mpd mpc

"mpc" is the default reference client used to interact with the MPD on the commandline.

4) Configure "/etc/mpd.conf":

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music_directory   "smb://your_lan_server/sharename/music"
bind_to_address   "any"

# Search for this section and change the following parameters:
audio_output {
    type "alsa"
    ...
    mixer_type   "software"
    ...
}

neighbors {
    plugin "smbclient"
}

5) Tell MPD to initialize its music database:

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$ mpc update

NOTE:
I ran into massive issues with MPD being completely unreliable when using pulseaudio

Unfortunately, I would like to keep pulseaudio installed so I can playback from other machines (using module-native-protocol-tcp).
However, even if I remove the "audio_output{}" block for pulse, it still spawns pulseaudio...

Will try to figure out how to run it without pulseaudio (plain, classic ALSA-only), as this should be usable then.

Great thanks to the following sources: