The LCDuino-1 I/O processor - Page 26

Great. I was hoping I could stack 4 of these in my 3" tall enclosure in order to save space.

If you use a philips cd-pro2 or whatever is the most recent version you get s/pdif out and you only have to make a controller consisting of an interface board between the arduino and the cd-pro and some code to make it work. or maybe even just code if you use a dedicated LCDuino. you might be able to wire the arduino directly to the cd-pro

edit: CD-PRO2LF is the most recent version

Philips CDM12 / CD-Pro / CD-Pro2 / CD-ProM / CD-Pro2LF - Marantzphilips.nl

CD player is so last year

What I would like to see is music player with VS1053 playing FLAC files from SD card.

Found this, it may only play MP3, but I still think it's pretty awesome!

I stopped using cd/dvd players many years ago. all my stuff is now computer-selected and in various formats (many of which a typical cd player will not understand).

add the fact that networked players allow faster shuffling between tracks and disks and that, once you've done a RIP, you are no longer doing a realtime 'extraction' as you play; so the file is already pre-read and already setup for you.

I would not be at all motivated to work on a cdplayer interface or code base; but I would be more interested in networked player interfaces (probably web-based since its more interoperable).

I used to be very much into mp3 (and even bought a semi-expensive commercial encoder) but these days, I can hear the diff between mp3 and flac pretty easily. I think my 'mp3 by choice' days are mostly over and its going to be flac-based, for me, for now on.

what might be interesting is to take a 'plastic firewall/router' kind of box (like the asus wifi router) and run a small linux distro on it, use its usb port as an spdif output and consider that system to be your fanless diskless networked audio player. it would have a web front end and the arduino would send web GET requests to it over normal tcp/ip for status display and play/pause/skip kinds of control features.

look very early in this thread and you'll see some pics of a proto that did this very thing. you'd need an 'ethernet shield' and some wiring to connect it to the lcduino (or use an old style proper arduino 'italy' board, that directly takes 'shield' form factor boards) and that would be a start on the web-client embedded arduino system.

the last time I tried ethernet, though, there were some stability bugs in the arudino libraries. its been months since I've looked but I did want things to stabilize (in their libraries) before really taking another look at this direction.

While we're on the subject, any recommendations for a good network player to incorporate into an amp (reading flac files off a network drive)? It would be even better if you could somehow hook it up to an Arduino / LCDuino to do control.

have you tried the mpd system, yet? 'music playback daemon' which runs on most unix systems (I don't know if it runs on windows or not).

its a distributed architecture and you can place functions almost where you like. its very flexible and can have a simple (or complex) web interface. I used a simple-simple (lol) web interface and did have the arduino do http GETs to control pause/play/next/prev stuff, as well as time time duration/remain and song name. but that's where I stopped and went back to the volume control stuff

give mpd a look. I used the ncurses (text terminal) version for a client interface. its what I used to create playlists, pause things, play/skip, etc. when I wanted to just do quick stuff, you'd telnet/ssh to the mpd box, run 'ncmpc', then quit and logout. it was very lightweight and just used VT100 style 'light graphics'. pretty much all the functionality you'd need, too.

the server, 'mpd' itself, is the thing that talks to the sound card and that sound card (spdif out) is what you'd send to your dac/amp. the audio does come from the same system the 'mpd' daemon runs on, yet the control can be done locally or remotely via the web/http.

the arduino part, the way I tried it, was to have the ethernet shield run the tcp/ip/sockets stack and the arduino would just issue web GETs and pend on their responses, parse them and display a formated version to the local lcd display. also accept IR commands and use those (FF, REW, PAUSE) to send the corresponding GET requests. something like that.

I do have an Arduino ethernet shield, but my server is running 2008. Control would be nice, but I'm mostly interested in a network player that will play files off any drive on the network, like a Sonos but not as expensive and more DIY to integrate into my amp.

this could be done. if your files are network accessible (your mp3, flac, etc) then mpd is running on a unix box and it can mount pretty much any nfs/smb filesystem you're likely to find. once it mounts that remote drive, it access the files same as if they were local.

you could also connect your drives directly to the mpd unix box and mount them locally. no need to go over the network if its an external drive (usb, fw, sata, whatever).

all the heavy lifting still needs to be on the pc side. the arduino is really only a controller. it will NOT route audio thru it, if that was your intention.

I was hoping for a hardware device that would replace the PC that could be integrated directly into the amp (like a Sonos), because I don't have a PC close to where the amp would go. So it would connect to a network drive over ethernet, stream the flac file, and then locally (inside the amp) convert to analog and play it. A network DAC, I guess. I didn't expect the Arduino to do it, but I was hoping there was some other simple network player solution.

Yeah I've been looking into them. Hopefully I can find a way to integrate it into the amp nicely. I don't want to derail the thread with this segue - thanks for the ideas!

I would like to see someone integrate this into a DAC and have the display show S/PDIF info like bit rate, sample rate, bit depth, number of channels, etc.