music basics

Equipment Required

Raspberry Pi running raspbian with user pi and ♣hostname♣
HiFiBerry AMP 2 attached with speakers

Step 1. Choose a player

There are many audio players available on Linux. I am not an audiophile. My goal is simplicity of use over quality of audio. Here are couple of audio players:

mpd and mpc
mplayer2
vlc

I use mpd and mpc. mpd is the music player daemon and mpc is a command line interface to control mpd and its content.

Step 2. Install software

alsa comes with raspbian

alsamixer is a gui to control volume

amixer is a command line tool to change the volume

$ sudo apt-get install mpd mpc -y

Step 3. Change permissions

$ sudo service mpd stop

$ sudo chmod -R g+w /var/lib/mpd

$ sudo chmod -R g+w /var/run/mpd

Step 4. Restart mpd service

$ sudo service mpd start

Step 5. Copy songs from MacBook to Raspberry Pi

I have 13GB of songs. To speed up the download, I disabled Wi-Fi on both the MacBook and the Raspberry Pi and connected using an ethernet cable. On the MacBook, I also disabled my Energy Saving features so the MacBook wouldn't go to sleep during the download.

With a wired connection, ♣hostname♣ doesn't resolve. I need to use ♣hostname♣.local

On a Mac,

open a finder window (1), go to iTunes directory and find all songs with .m4a or whatever extensions in use
create a temporary folder called music on your Desktop
open the music folder in finder window 2
copy all the files from finder window 1 to finder window 2
open terminal window and navigate to iTune and create a temporary directory called music
- navigate to finder window 2 (cd /Users/.../Desktop/music)
- Copy all the music files to your raspberry pi using the command:

scp * pi@♣hostname♣.local:Music/.

Step 6. Check if things work

I have Bruno Mars' 24K Magic in the /home/pi/Music directory on the Raspberry Pi. Note there are three slashes and the track number is included

mpc insert "file:///home/pi/Music/01 24K Magic.m4a"

mpc play

mpc stop

Appendix:

Various Commands

aplay -l

lists the playback hardware

mpc outputs

shows if the output is enabled