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casey langen edited this page Feb 20, 2017 · 19 revisions

musikbox runs great on a raspberry pi when properly configured. it can be plugged directly into your home stereo system and controlled remotely, both via ssh and a companion android app called musikdroid.

operating system setup

musikbox on a raspberry pi requires raspbian jessie.

if you already have a functioning system you can skip ahead to the installation section. these first few steps document how to get a freshly installed pi ready for musikbox.

reconfigure your keyboard

by default the raspberry pi comes configured with a GB keyboard layout. depending on where you live, this can cause problems. the first order of business is to reconfigure your keyboard.

  • sudo vi /etc/default/keyboard
  • set: XKBLAYOUT="us" (or other country code, as appropriate)
  • sudo reboot

setup wifi

let's get wifi up and running by connecting to the access point.

  • sudo vi /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

    adjust your country as necessary, then add access point info to the bottom of the file. the entire file should look something like this:

    country=US
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
  ssid="ACCESS_POINT_NAME"
  psk="WIFI_PASSWORD"
}

  • sudo reboot (or you can try playing with ifconfig to bring the interface down, then up; i ended up rebooting)

update your system

this will update all software on the system to the latest available versions.

  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  • sudo reboot (maybe not necessary)

automatically mount USB drives

you can configure the operating system automatically mount USB disk drives to a known location so musikbox can scan them during startup for new music. this is as easy as installing the usbmount package and configuring musikbox to index the /media/ directory on the filesystem.

  • sudo apt-get install usbmount

using musikbox

install musikbox binaries

  • download the musikbox_x.x.x_raspberry_pi_armhf.deb file from the releases page.
  • sudo dpkg -i ./musikbox_x.x.x_raspberry_pi_armhf.deb (this will likely fail due to missing packages...)
  • sudo apt-get install -f (this will install the missing packages, and finish the installation)
  • musikbox (start it up to make sure it works)

configure music paths

with musikbox running you can configure paths on your system you want to be automatically scanned for music. if you installed usbmount above, you should have musikbox index /media/usb0 through /media/usb7.

  • important: do not add /media/usb! usbmount appears to set this up as a symlink to /media/usb0; doing so will result in duplicate music in your library.

run musikbox on startup

it's useful to have musikbox start whenever the pi boots so it's always running.

  • sudo vim /etc/rc.local
  • add the following line: su - pi -c "screen -dmS musikbox musikbox"

note that the above will start musikbox in a screen session as the pi user. that means you can always shell in and do a screen -r musikbox to reattach to it to control playback from a computer.

troubleshooting / optional configuration

you probably shouldn't do any of this unless you are having problems!

integrated sound card setup

you should be using an iqaudio pi-dac+... or even a behringer uca222 sound card! the built-in card is pretty bad -- it's very tinny and noisy. however, if you must use the built in card and things aren't working, you probably need to switch to the analog output:

  • sudo raspi-config
  • advanced options
  • audio
  • force 3.5mm ('headphone') jack

disable wifi power saving

i had an older raspberry pi that seemed to put the wifi card into powersave mode very frequently, making connecting to the device annoying. if you have this problem you can try to disable power saving mode by adding wireless-poweroff to each wifi adapter's configuration.

  • sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces 
    ...
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
  wireless-power off

allow-hotplug wlan1
iface wlan1 inet manual
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
  wireless-power off
...

make wifi reconnection more aggressive

my old wifi router was pretty unstable, and the Pi wasn't good about reconnecting automatically. you can setup a cron job to test the connection and automatically reconnect every couple minutes.

first, create a script to test the connection and bring the interface down, then back up if there are problems:

  • sudo touch /usr/local/bin/wifi_rebooter.sh
  • sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wifirebooter.sh
  • sudo vi /usr/local/bin/wifi_rebooter.sh 
    #!/bin/bash
# http://alexba.in/blog/2015/01/14/automatically-reconnecting-wifi-on-a-raspberrypi/

# The IP for the server you wish to ping (8.8.8.8 is a public Google DNS server)
SERVER=8.8.8.8

# Only send two pings, sending output to /dev/null
ping -c2 ${SERVER} > /dev/null

# If the return code from ping ($?) is not 0 (meaning there was an error)
if [ $? != 0 ]
then
    # Restart the wireless interface
    ifdown --force wlan0
    ifup wlan0
fi

second, add a cron job to run every minute (or whatever) that invokes the script from above:

  • sudo vi /etc/crontab 
    */1 * * * *     root    /usr/local/bin/wifi_rebooter.sh

(note: replace "1" above with the desired interval, in minutes.)

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