Our stereo installation supports, according to the box, streaming over AirPlay (although the normal RAOP stuff doesn't seem to work on it. I think it's something called Airport Express), DLNA and Windows Media Sharing.
On Ubuntu, it seems almost impossible to get this thing to work, while on Windows it's possible with iTunes and Airfoil.
What I've tried, and what went wrong
- Airplay: Streaming over PulseAudio
- Music players refuse to play. Status changes to playing, but the search bar thingy and the position counter don't progress. No sound comes out of either the stereo installation or the computer. I've also tried to manually create a "Sink" (?) using
pactl load-module module-raop-sink server=192.168.1.32. The result was the same.
- Music players refuse to play. Status changes to playing, but the search bar thingy and the position counter don't progress. No sound comes out of either the stereo installation or the computer. I've also tried to manually create a "Sink" (?) using
- Airplay: Stream2IP
- I'm guessing this uses the same backend as the Pulseaudio thing, or perhaps even does exactly the same. It says it's connected, but exactly the same happens as did with the previous method. The stereo installation doesn't even recognise any kind of connection. It just continues playing what it's already playing.
- DLNA: Stream2IP
- When I go to Media Server on the stereo installation, it sees RobinJ: Root. Music, Browse Files, ... all go on to a screen saying <Empty>.
- DLNA: Serviio
- This actually seems to work fine. The free version is limited, and it's not open source, but at least it allows me basic streaming features. However, what I'd prefer is for audio from a specific applicattion, or if possible the whole system, to get streamed to the stereo installation. Rather than me having to browse through menu's on the stereo to choose a song.
- Windows Media Sharing: Nothing
- I have no idea how to do this on Ubuntu.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Don't just close this as an "Exact duplicate", because if I haven't found an answer after looking for half a year, I think it's safe to assume that the answer is not yet on this website.
I'm running Ubuntu 13.04, but I don't mind switching to 12.04 or 12.10, or even en different distro, if it'll work there.
To my observation the main reason why it seems complicated to achieve media streaming to any external hardware media devices is that the manufacturers of these devices lean back and rely on the presence of OS X or Windows on their customer's machines.
DLNA media file access
From the many solutions that do exist I had success with the following solutions for DLNA media access for my Internet Radio, Android Devices, and Smart TV:
My favourite on that list definitely is minidlna, which now runs here 7/24 for several months with no issues. By default minidlna will run on startup as a service. To run it in user space you may use stream2ip from version > 1.0, or the MiniDLNA Application Indicator I made for this. You will still have to set up minidlna by its configuration file first.
Live streams
Sadly none of these solutions are able to stream the output of my soundcard live to the receiver. Newer devices do not support the old RAOP protocol used by pulseaudio but seem to need the newer RAOP2 protocol which is not (yet?) available for Ubuntu.
Live streams to external (non-Ubuntu) devices is possible in case they support the RTP protocol pulseaudio is able to stream with, but I have not found one which does.
Another possibility is setting up an Iceast Internet Radio Server to generate our own private radio "station" in our local network. This works great but a prererequisite is that the tuner is able to connect to a stream defined by its IP-adress, and port. It should be an easy thing to do, but sadly most devices do not offer this. Instead they support Internet Radio directory services (e.g. vTuner, or tunein) which may dependent on the device not support custom radio streams to be added. From me only my radio device which operates through Reciva has no issues playing custom streams generated from Icecast (both via stream2ip, or from command line).
Marantz
Last time I contacted Marantz (August 2012) they gave me the following information regarding support for a custom radio station:
We may try if adding a custom URL in a personalized instance of a radio station service (see this blog for Denon) will work by now. For Marantz we can access the vTuner service on http://radiomarantz.com/. To personalize the service we need to register with the device's unique access code (likely to be the MAC). We then may be able to add the local URL of our Icecast radio stream (
<IP>:<Port>/stream.mp3) as a custom radio station. Unfortunately due to lack of hardware we can't test this here.Take a look at github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dlna.
It was designed to stream the sound of your applications to DLNA devices in your network. You can choose which application to play on your device via pavucontrol.
Takkat's hint for Marantz ("...To personalize the service we need to register with the device's unique...") helped me set this up successfully with the M-CR603 and I hope my update is useful though this thread (and the M-CR603) are quite old. The access code on radiomarantz.com is the device MAC. Via the Software Center I set up darkice and icecast2 on my Thinkpad W520 running Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit, using one of the many guides available in the public domain. On radiomarantz.com I added the local URL of the resulting Icecast radio stream (http://192.168.xx.yy:8000/stream.mp3) as a custom radio station. It worked with almost no glitches.