My wife and I like music. Rock mostly, so we don’t even have to fight about what to play. There’re some radio stations here in Spain which play mostly rock, but then comes the usual news program, or a sports one… so we wanted an easy (and affordable) way to broadcast our own music all over the hose.
We’re both computer engineers (doh!) so our first choice was streaming. On one end of our house is the computer room and on the other the living room, with an XBOX running XBox Media Center and an ethernet cable across the corridor, so we thought of installing icecast and stream our music to both rooms. But what about our bedroom? Or the courtyard?
We wanted the easyness and mobility of the radio. After considering using a laptop for wireless streaming (naaah) we decided to ditch computers for the broadcats part and try to get our own short range FM radio station running.
Our ideal device specifications were:
- FM radio, so we could tune it with any HI-FI system
- The signal should reach around 15-20m (for a 100m2 house)
- It should work without batteries (having to change them is a PITA)
- Standard jack line-in connector, so we could just plug it to the soundcard’s line-out.
- Easy installation, already assembled (I’m not that good with a soldering iron)
After
looking for something like this on eBay, Amazon, etc. to no avail, we found what we wanted on an spanish on-line electronics store: the UK-222 kit at Coelma Todo Electrónica (there should be something similar at Radio Shack or the likes).
Its signal reaches 100m (more than we needed), it runs on a 9v battery (or an AC/DC adaptor, of course), has an on/off switch and a variable resistor to select the frecuency on which to broadcast, in order to avoid interferences with “real” radio stations. Installation was simple, we plugged it to an AC/DC adaptor, to the PC line-out and had at once Thunderstruck playing on every room in the house.
After this initial test-run, we drilled some holes for the line-in connector, the on/off switch and the power led on a 5 1/4 bay front pannel and got the circuit into one of our computers which runs 24/7 (you know
the drill: web server, router, firewall…). We even got yet another circuit to “downsample” from the PC’s power supply 12v line to 9v, so that we wouldn’t need the external AC/DC adaptor, but it introduced some interferences on the signal.
Now we had to find a proper software to drive the thing. It had to be remote-controlled, as this computer where we installed the radio on doesn’t has a monitor nor a keyboard. Our first choice was mpd. It looked right, had an internal DB with id3 tag support, and plenty of web-based and GTK/win32/Java clients, but in the end none of these GUIs was up to our standards (set quite high by AmaroK and the like…)
And then we found Ampache, a great piece of software. It’s a web-based application (php-mysql) able to drive all your music collection. It has all the features you could expect: multi-user, the ability to sort your collection by artist/genere/album using id3 tags, cover-art fetching, a song-rating system, local playback (via mpd) and even streaming support, so now we have our music available wherever we go and have an Internet connection (at work, or…) It even has a plug-in to send your songs to last.fm.
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