Streaming audio over FM

I assume you’ve heard of Spotify – a completely massive music database for streaming with a lightning fast client; find your fav music in milliseconds.

Anyway, I got myself an account but rather quickly decided my laptop speaker did not make the music selection justice (and really, no matter the selection, the lap top speaker would be a joy killer), so I decided to put one of the old boxes to use and plug it into the stereo.

Said and done, I grabbed an old lappy with a broken screen I previously thought would be my video player, but it lacked the CPU power to do better than 50% frame drop rate. I guess it had an old Fedora 6 installation on it.

I should also mention that while I have ran cables to some places in the house, the corner of the stereo is unwired.

Thus, I spent more time than I really had learning about wireless under linux. Then I formatted the harddisk and installed FC9 on it. It accepted the wlan card without a problem, but I still couldn’t connect to the network. A few hours later I moved myself and the machine to a place where I knew for sure the wlan waves actually reached. Doh. The material in my house eats radio waves like pop corn.

At this point I was ready to install Spotify. On the minus side there is no linux client available. On the plus side it worked like a charm using Wine. Yehaa! For several minutes this worked out well. Using VNC I could easily remote to the “jukebox” to control the spotify client and it poured out the lovely tunes of my choice.

Then it lost the network connection, and I had to restart the Spotify client and then it played on and on for a few more minutes. Not satisfied!

I finally gave up on the project and bought one of those FM transmitters usually used to get the mp3 player to send audio to the car stereo.

Now I have Spotify running on my trustworthy ol’ lappy, the FM transmitter just beside me and music coming from my stereo tuned into FM 98.3MHz. If it hand’t been for the complete radio proof house I live in my neighbours could also enjoy the ride

–Jesper Hogstrom