Server setup

This HowTo is about setting up the audio server on Ubuntu and RaspberryPi. The instructions are mainly for Ubuntu and notes for RPi are added where applicable.

Avahi advertises services over network and Snapcast needs it. Run this as a sudoer.

  ps aux | grep avahi | grep -v grep || sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon

RPi: Mopidy on RPi needs manual install for the latest version. Dependencies may also differ (eg. GStreamer 1.0 not 0.10). These should get installed automatically from the new Mopidy repository added to the local list. Follow these instructions: https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/installation/debian/#debian-install.

  sudo apt-get install mopidy

You can also install mopidy-doc for local documentation.

When Mopidy runs as a service in the default single-zone mode, the main config file is /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf. To see how Mopidy sees its configuration, run:

  sudo mopidyctl config

When writing configs, make sure the parameters go under right headings. The headings are the square brackets. The basic config entries to be added to /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf are the following.

  [audio]
  output = audioresample ! audioconvert ! audio/x-raw,rate=48000,channels=2,format=S16LE ! wavenc ! filesink location=/tmp/snapfifo-livingroom

The output config details have to agree with Snapcast server's configuration.

The default port is 6680 and it can stay this way. But the hostname by default set to 127.0.0.1 has to be changed in order be available to other machines.

  [http]
  hostname = 0.0.0.0

Set additional music file locations to the media_dirs parameter under the [file] heading.

For example:

  [file]

media_dirs = /home/teammember/Music

More on the file extension here: https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/ext/file/.

Binding LAN resources is described in a later point.

  sudo systemctl restart mopidy.service

And now you should be able to access a Mopidy webpage at localhost:6680 from the server, or at 192.168.X.X:6680 or a similar LAN address. There should also be a fifo created in /tmp with the name snapfifo-livingroom if you followed the instructions literally.

To have Mopidy started as service by default at system startup, run this:

  sudo systemctl enable mopidy.service

Otherwise start and stop as needed with either

  sudo systemctl start mopidy.service

or

  sudo systemctl stop mopidy.service

For more Mopidy configuration details see https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/config/.

This is for easy web control of what's broadcast by the Mopidy server. To install it, you probably need the Python package manager pip. Make sure you have it on your machine:

  sudo apt-get install python-pip

Now install Moped itself.

  sudo pip install Mopidy-Moped

After a Mopidy restart, you should be able to access the Moped interface at localhost:6680/moped from the server and the same port and path with a proper ip from another LAN machine.

You can find Moped's page at https://github.com/martijnboland/moped.

Snapcast reads the music from Mopidy using the pipe in /tmp. Then it broadcasts it over LAN to Snapcast clients. The service is advertised automatically by Avahi (see step 1). You need to:

a) Download it from https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/releases/tag/v0.10.0. Choose a server package with a .deb extension and (amd64 before it for a standard laptop or PC). If you're using the graphical interfacal, you can download it and then run it double-clicking on the downloaded file. Or using the command line, get the file location, and then do something like:

  cd &&
  wget https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/releases/download/v0.10.0/snapserver_0.10.0_amd64.deb &&
  sudo dpkg -i snapserver_0.10.0_amd64.deb 

The configuration file should at in /etc/default/snapserver. The SNAPSERVER_OPTS parameter needs to be set to integrate the Snapcast server with Mopidy. Either add the following line to the config file, or edit the line containing the SNAPSERVER_OPTS parameter to look like this:

  SNAPSERVER_OPTS="-d -s pipe:///tmp/snapfifo-livingroom?name=livingroom&sampleformat=48000:16:2&codec=flac"

Now reload the service with

  sudo systemctl restart snapserver.service

Snapserver runs as a service and by default should be starting by system bootup. To get or change this behaviour follow the corresponding instructions described in step 3.

This extension facilitates restreaming the audio from YouTube videos. The package is present in Ubuntu repositories. To install it from the command line, type

  sudo apt-get install mopidy-youtube 

For playing Youtube GStreamer plugins are needed, in particualar this one:

  sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad

Restart Mopidy. Now the searchbox on the Moped page should be able to find YouTube videos. You can also paste the whole YouTube addresses as they appear in the browser while watching videos.

If resolving of URIs stops working, always try to update the pafy library first:

  pip install --upgrade pafy

For YouTube stream reading problems, try installing the Python youtube-dl library using pip:

  sudo pip install youtube-dl

These instructions are for binding LAN resources accessible through Samba.

Scan local services.

  smbtree -S

Find out the server address.

  avahi-browse -ar

Create a mount point and mount the samba directories. For this the package cifs-utils is needed. To set up a mount at system startup, append the following line to /etc/fstab:

  //192.168.1.32/media/mukke /mnt/music cifs credentials=/root/.smb_music_credentials,uid=root,gid=root,ro 0 0

And create the credentials file in /root with the following lines:

  .smb_music_credentials
  username=Anonymous
  password=''

To get all /etc/fstab entries mounted now, run:

  sudo mount -a

More on the [local] extension: https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/ext/local/.

The scan has to be executed with the right configs. If Mopidy runs as a service, check systemctl with a running mopidy.service instance to see the right configs. Then perform the following (with the right configs):

  sudo mopidy --config /usr/share/mopidy/conf.d:/etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf local scan

The default library is a json file. Another option is a sqlite database.

With a json library, Mopidy service needs a restart to see the rescanned media correctly.

Consider adding a scan action to /etc/init.d/mopidy.