These days we have so many devices that can play music in our homes. Some are for personal use but, others for enjoying with others. When you have a big party or a function at your home, you want to play the same music everywhere in the house. One solution that you might have heard about is to use expensive multi-room players. There is another cheaper solution that makes use of devices that are already in your house and the tiny wonder Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that fits into a small board. Even though it is very tiny, every component necessary for a computer to function well can be found in a Raspberry Pi. In fact, the pi can even connect to a network to communicate with other devices and even control them. Or, you can control your Pi from your PC or smartphone over the internet.

Requirements

The requirements for this raspberry-pi projects vary according to what you have in your home. You may find a lot of the components listed below in your home. Even if you don't already have them, chances are you have something else that can be used in place of them. The main motive behind this raspberry-pi projects is to minimize cost so buy as few items as possible.

1. Raspberry Pi B+

2. Pi Case

3. Micro USB Power Supply

4. Wireless Audio Transmitter

5. Wireless Audio Receiver

6. Other miscellaneous items like cables and micro SD cards as needed.

Steps to set up a Pi Multi-Room Music Player

Multiroom player

Now, we have all the required items ready we can head to creating our own affordable multi-room music player using Raspberry Pi.

Step1:- Setting up Hardware

This part involves placing the hardware on your desired locations and providing them power supply. That does not mean you have to power them up soon. Switch on power supply only after the sofware setup is complete.

Step 2 :- Installing software

You have to install an operating system in your Raspberry Pi before you can do anything with it. The recommended operating system is Raspbian but you can install almost any UNIX-like operating system. For audio applications like ours there are custom distributions like Pi MusicBox. To install an operating system on your Pi you will need a microSD card. You have to write the image of the operating system of your choice into the microSD card. In this tutorial we take the case of PiMusicBox.

There are plenty of software available for all kinds of operating systems that allow you to write an operating system image into your microSD card. If you are planning to use a LAN connection on your Raspberry Pi you can begin the setup. If you would like to use a WiFi connection you have to enter WiFi network name and password in the 'settings.ni' file inside the config folder of the microSD card bearing the image of the operating system. After entering the details you can insert the card into the slot in the Raspberry Pi and power it up.

Step 3 :- Configuring PiMusicBox

Once the Pi is up and running open a web browser from your PC or laptop and open the URL given below to access your PiMusicBox settings. The same URL may be used from a web browser in your smartphone to control streaming.

http://musicbox.local/

In the GUI that appears select settings and enter necessary information. In the Network settings you may enter your WiFi network name and password and the workgroup name. You can change device name, choose a URL that the Pi will start playing on boot(Autoplay URL), root password and other device and streaming related settings drom the Device Settings.

Further settings let you control the audio and choosing your desired method for adding music to be played. You may share a folder in your PC over samba or load music to a USB drive and plug it into your Pi or even copy files from PC to the SD card if you have a lot of free space in your card.

Alternative Method

People who are using distros like Raspbian that are not customized for music streaming may follow an alternative method. In this method a music streaming application like mysqueezebox may be installed in your Raspberry Pi, files added to an expanded file system and turning your Pi into a media server.