I spent yesterday fighting with systemd, and once I sorted out how to make a thing wait for actual network connectivity, rather than just a loaded network stack, I finished implementing gmrender-resurrect on a radio I’m improving, and it works a charm - the radio appears as a device in the “casting” menus of my apps, so I can play an album in my Jellyfin server and send it to the radio. It will be the “shop radio” now. In the background you can see the old Satellite Radio speaker unit that I’ve been using - it sounds quite good, which is why I’ve carried it forward twenty years to the future.
A retro-engineered music player that pluts into the Sirius radio interface might be a fun future project actually…
But I digress. I’m curious, if I was to sort out the details and create a PR for the DLNA renderer, would it be accepted?
My use case: every week - EVERY week - the band needs to listen to a song to get refreshed on some detail or other, was that a D or a Dm, did they do the A part or the B part there, etc.
Most often, someone pulls out their phone and holds it up to a mic and I go friggin insane. Less often, someone goes to the trouble of walking over and plugging their phone into the 1/8" headphone connector that I have plugged into the mixer and conveniently placed where everyone can reach it and we can all listen in a civilized manner.
More ideal is, I enable the DLNA rendering chain on my Zynthian (which generally has a wired connection at my place, anyways) and tell folks they can connect to our wifi and “chromecast” to it. I have enough old Pis that I can and probably will just set one up by the mixer for the moment, but this would be a convenient thing to be able to implement in hotspot mode when out at an isolated jamspace. Also a good way to do music on break without loading up the zynth with files.
Like I said, I might have missed this already being a feature, but if not, it is a very useful thing for music makers and dreamers of dreams and oughta be, and while I’m still getting this whole programming thing sorted out, I just finished solving this problem on another Pi yesterday and it looks like a very good candidate for my first contribution.
I’m currently codependent on a Boss GP-10 for my guitar needs, but I’m already making plans to reduce that machine’s duty to guitar modeling only and start using either MOD or just a combination of DSP stuff. I have also successfully used it as the sound system for a DIY zynthian actually, and the zynth sees all 6 strings individually, but I couldn’t sort out how to cut the stereo summed signal out before I moved on to another shiny object.
edit: oh but re the radio, you can see I’ve got some encoder modules mounted with the original bakelite knobs, they’re not wired up yet but they will control On/Off/Vol on the left, Tuning in the middle (the phone you can see mounted behind the tuner window will provide the “needle” as well as some special effects, and there’s a very tight line right at the top where it can actually display a very small line of text),
and the right knob will of course control the Flux Capacitor. What that means in the real world is it’ll be a low-pass filter for year of release, so you can dial in 80s radio, 70s radio, 30s radio, 1860s radio, 14th century radio (a lot of monks), and if you dial back far enough it’ll just play some sort of representation of the cosmic background radiation of the big bang.
Not sure what’ll happen if you dial it to the future, but it will absolutely definitely without QUESTION… involve Huey Lewis And The News.