Like many of you, I store all my music digitally on a central server in my home. The problem is when I walk from room to room, my music doesn't come with me. I could carry around an iThingy or put it on my phone, but I'd rather not have to wear headphones, and no matter how awesome they are in their class, tiny phone speakers still are tiny phone speakers. Fortunately, I have a lot of computer hardware lying around from past upgrades, so it was fairly easy for me to come up with some small, older systems for each area of my house. Now, instead of listening to music on a little device, I use a device to tag my location and have the music follow me wherever I go.

The system is easy to build and uses mostly off-the-shelf open-source programs. In addition to the player and control system, you need a way of tagging your location in the house. I use the Bluetooth radio on my phone, but you also could use RFID tags, Webcams with motion detection or facial recognition, or pretty much anything else that will let the system know where you are. For this setup though, I'm assuming you're using a Bluetooth device.

The central piece to this project is a server-based music player. I am using the Music Player Dæmon (MPD), a wonderful server-based system released under the GNU General Public License and available from the repositories of most Linux distributions. Install the software with your favorite package management system. In addition to this player, you need to set up a streaming system. Icecast fulfills this requirement and also is widely available. Install it as well.

Configuring MPD is fairly straightforward. The default file for your distribution is probably very similar to the example below, but you may need to change a few things.

The music_directory entry should point to the directory that contains the music files and one bind_to_address should contain the non-loopback name or address of the server. If it binds only to 127.0.0.1, outside boxes may have trouble connecting to it.

The audio_output section defines where the music goes when it plays. In this case, you want to transcode it to Ogg format and send it to the Icecast server on the same host (although you could run these on different systems if it makes sense for your setup). Within this section, the port and password must match the configuration for the Icecast server, and the mount will define the portion of the URI after the server name. For simplicity, I've left it at /. If you start MPD after this configuration file is set up, it will be missing the Icecast socket to play to, so you need to set that up next. Learn how to do so, now!

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