Preparing your Raspberry Pi¶

Hardware¶

For my raspberry pi jukebox I used the following hardware:

Raspberry Pi, I used a B+ model, but any will model do as long as it fits with the:

Capacitive Touchscreen from Adafruit: http://www.adafruit.com/products/2423

8 GB SD card

USB audiocard (since the jack output on the Raspberry Pi gave me too much of a headache)

I also built my own case with speakers and in-built amp, but I’ll spare you these ;-).

Installing the operating system¶

I installed a raspbian pre-configured for the Capacitive touchscreen with an image downloaded from this page: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-2-8-pitft-capacitive-touch/easy-install. Since the installation instructions differ per operating system and provided on this page are quite good, you can follow these.

Configuring the Raspberry Pi¶

You can configure some settings on your Raspberry Pi using the command

sudo raspi-config

Here you can easily do some configurations. Some that I preferred to do:

Expand the file-system (1) - The initial installation of the OS does not make full use of your SD card. Why throw away so much space?. This option makes sure you use your whole SD card.
Internationalization options (4) - Configure your timezone and locale settings
Advanced options (8) - Host name (A2) - Of course you want your Pi-Jukebox recognizable in the network as such, so change it to ‘pi-jukebox’. This step is not a necessity for following steps.

Configuring the USB music device¶

To configure the sound card’s initial volume I used alsamixer. Because we want to configure the USB soundcard, and not the HDMI or jack output we use the -c 1 switch, like so:

alsamixer -c 1

Since we want to make sure the volume settings are kept on reboot we use:

sudo alsactl store

Installing and configuring mpd¶

First, we’ll just install mpd.

sudo apt-get install mpd mpc

Then we configure mpd’s settings with:

sudo nano /etc/mpd.conf

Some mpd clients use zero-conf so that accessing the mpd is made extremely easy. For that I will install the necessary components in a later step. For now we can already set-up the feature in the config by un-comment the line containing:

zeroconf_enabled        "yes"

and change the line for the zero-conf name so becomes:

zeroconf_name           "Pi-Jukebox"

last.fm scrobbling¶

Since I have an last.fm account I also want to scrobble my plays to it. Luckily a nice little tool called mpdscribble allows us to do just that. Install it with

sudo apt-get install mpdscribble

Configure it:

sudo nano /etc/default/mpdscribble

Here we change “MPD_SYSTEMWIDE=0” to “MPD_SYSTEMWIDE=1” and add the lines:

[last.fm]
url=http://post.audioscrobbler.com/
username=_yourusername_
password=_yourpassword_
journal=/var/cache/mpdscribble/lastfm.journal   # The file where mpdscribble should store its Last.fm journal in case you do not have a connection to the Last.fm server.

last.fm suggestions¶

Wouldn’t it be neat if your playlist would be supplemented with music similar to the last track in your playlist? A tool called mpd-sima does just that. We install and start it with:

sudo apt-get install mpd-sima
sudo service mpd-sima start

This automatically adds 1 track whenever your player reaches the last track in your current playlist. You can change some of it’s behaviour by editing the, self explanatory, configuration file and restarting the service after that:

sudo nano /etc/mpd-sima.cfg
sudo service mpd-sima restart

Setting up the music library¶

Setting up the NAS drive¶

My NAS drive contains a publicly (LAN public) available directory called Public, which in turn contains my music folder surprisingly called ‘Music’.

Mounting the NAS¶

For mpd to be able to make use of your NAS drive you need to mount it at boot time. First create a directory where the NAS drive will be mounted:

sudo mkdir /mnt/nas_drive

Then, to make sure the drive mounts on boot, edit fstab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

and add something along the following line

//_your.nas.drive.ip_/Public /mnt/nas_drive cifs guest,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8 0 0

Now everything should be ready to mount the NAS at boot. To mount without rebooting now (and test whether it works), do:

sudo mount -a

Hopefully you didn’t get an error message. See if the NAS content is available on your Pi-Jukebox, do:

ls -l /mnt/nas_drive

Does the output look familiar? Then everything should be fine

Making the NAS available for mpd¶

In order for mpd to be able to scan the music on the NAS we must make a link to the NAS drive in the directory where mpd scans it’s music. Keep in mind that I stored my music in a subdirectory called ‘Music’ of the just mounted directory ‘Public’. Make the link like so:

sudo ln -s /mnt/nas_drive/Music/  /var/lib/mpd/music/

Setting up USB stick configuration¶

Because I wanted to make sure I was able to access the USB stick, whatever name it might have, I made use of usbmount. This utility mounts all usb drives in the directory /media in subdirectories called usb0,usb1 and so on.

sudo apt-get install usbmount

To make the mounted (or future mounted) USB sticks available to mpd scanning we also make a link to these:

sudo ln -s /media/ /var/lib/mpd/music/

Finally: adding the music to the mpd library¶

To scan all the music sources you just added so the music can actually be reached through mpd:

mpc update

Depending on the size of your library this can take some time. Make sure the scan is completed before rebooting or turning off your Raspberry or you’ll have to start scanning again. I suggest to do the scanning after completing the rest of the set-up.

Zeroconf¶

Zeroconf, sometimes called bonjour, is a group of utilities that allows for easy networking without special configuration or any manual operations. I also wanted the possibility to control the Pi-Jukebox from other devices within the network I thought this would be a useful addition. The installation is quite straightforward:

sudo apt-get install libnss-mdns

Starting the zeroconf deamon:

sudo service avahi-daemon restart

Samba server¶

We need to put the pi-jukebox program on the device, and it is also nice if we can access the USB storage devices so we can put some files on them. For this we’re going to create two window shares. One for the home directory of the user ‘pi’ and one for the USB mount directory.

First we’re going to install samba and related packages:

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin

Now we create the shares by editing the samba config:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

and adding the entries

wins support = yes

[pihome]
   comment= Pi Home
   path=/home/pi
   browseable=Yes
   writeable=Yes
   only guest=no
   create mask=0777
   directory mask=0777
   public=no

[piusb]
   comment= Pi USB drives
   path=/media
   browseable=Yes
   writeable=Yes
   only guest=no
   create mask=0777
   directory mask=0777
   public=no

Then we’re going to set the samba user pi’s password. I’m going to share a big secret here: I kept it the same as the default pi account: ‘raspberry’

sudo smbpasswd -a pi

To make the changes effective we’re going to restart the samba server:

sudo service samba restart

WiFi¶

You want to enable your WiFi right? Is there life worth living without wifi? So bet your life I’m on it! I’m all about ‘making magic happen’. In time it will be all right here... Wait, see and weep.