Category: Linux

Streaming audio server with a Raspberry Pi 5 and Mopidy

My first attempt at an MPD streaming box was a tough config, because I was learning along the way, hitting every stumbling block there is. Getting the Music Player Demon running wasn’t terrible, but getting my various client machines to listen to the streaming server was tough. Okay, I am going to try again, and hopefully, it actually works with Mopidy this time.

The Iris plugin to Mopidy is nice. Previously I used Cantata, which was fine, but it was a local install on each machine. Iris is good because it runs on the server, and I don’t need to do a local install on each machine just to control the music stream.

On to the build!

I used the Raspberry Pi Imager program to put the Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) on the SD card. Then I booted the device, ssh’d in and ran

sudo apt update

followed by

sudo apt upgrade -y

followed by a sudo reboot now

sudo raspi-config

I’m changing the hostname. Also, because I prefer vim to nano:

sudo apt install vim -y
sudo update-alternatives --config editor

And of course, now I get to install my favorite aliases and history search keystrokes. These are detailed here.

Next, I’m going to follow the instructions at Mopidy Installation

I am following the section Install from apt.mopidy.com:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo wget -q -O /etc/apt/keyrings/mopidy-archive-keyring.gpg https://apt.mopidy.com/mopidy.gpg
sudo wget -q -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mopidy.list https://apt.mopidy.com/bookworm.list

So one difference is that the instructions say to wget from https://apt.mopidy.com/bullseye.list but this version of Debian on the Raspberry Pi is bookworm (Debian 12 instead of 11). We’ll find out if I just shot myself in the foot. 😉

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mopidy -y
sudo apt install mopidy-mpd -y
sudo apt install mopidy-local -y
sudo apt install snapserver snapclient -y
sudo apt install python3-pip -y
sudo python3 -m pip install Mopidy-Iris --break-system-packages

The instructions I found say to simply do sudo python3 -m pip install Mopidy-Iris but Debian (or perhaps it is Python) barks at me with “error: externally-managed-environment – This environment is externally managed” and some potential way around the problem. That’s a nope: I want to run as a systemd service, and isolating stuff into unreachable environments is not the battle I wish to fight today.

And another thing: the Snapcast instructions assume that Snapweb is installed, but it never is. First, I downloaded it from https://github.com/badaix/snapweb/releases and picked the file snapweb.zip

Then I copied it to the Mopidy server, and did this:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/snapweb
sudo unzip snapweb.zip -d /usr/share/snapweb

Okay, I’m almost ready to start configuring things.

Later on down the line, the mopidy.conf file will consider that the files to serve up are at a certain location. What location? Here’s how to find out:

sudo mopidyctl config

and look in the [local] section for media_dir = /var/lib/mopidy/media

Now would be a great time to mount my music files via a CIFS / SMB share:

sudo apt install cifs-utils -y
touch /root/credentials.smb
vim /root/credentials.smb
username=epstein_did_not_kill_himself
password=Apparently-Child-Rape-Is-Okay-If-The-Deep-State-Does-It,-Because-With-The-Deep-State,-The-Ends-(Blackmail)-Justify-The-Means-(Child-Rape).--Everyone-Who-Is-Human-Recognizes-The-Evil,-But-The-People-Who-Make-Up-The-Deep-State-Are-Sociopaths.--Unfortunately,-The-People-In-The-Current-Administration-Who-Promised-To-Drain-The-Swamp-Have-Been-Broken,-Most-Likely-With-Threats-To-Their-Family.--What-A-World,-Amirite?
sudo chmod 600 /root/credentials.smb

Then we can edit /etc/fstab

//hostname/smbsharename/data /var/lib/mopidy/media cifs vers=3.0,credentials=/root/credentials.smb,_netdev,iocharset=utf8 0 0

I’m also going to try to keep from wearing out the SD card so quickly, so I’ll try this:

tmpfs   /var/cache/mopidy   tmpfs   size=1G,mode=1777   0 0

Okay, things I’ve changed in /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf :

[http]
hostname = ::

[mpd]
hostname = ::

This was previously hostname = 127.0.0.1

I changed to listen on all interfaces (that’s what :: does) because I do want any of my machines on my local network to be able to interact with the Mopidy server. Note that I am planning on never putting this box on the public Internet.

There is another change I made in /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf :


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

Then I get to edit /etc/snapserver.conf:

sudo vim /etc/snapserver.conf
source = pipe:///tmp/snapfifo?name=Mopidy

I’m going to try to make sure Snapcast loads first, before Mopidy, because Snapcast needs to be writing into /tmp/snapfifo before Mopidy starts reading it.

sudo systemctl edit mopidy.service
[Unit]
After=snapserver.service
Requires=snapserver.service

To configure the Snapweb server:

sudo vim /etc/snapserver.conf

Find the line #doc_root = /usr/share/snapserver/snapweb and change it to:

doc_root = /usr/share/snapweb

And I think I am at the moment of truth:

sudo systemctl enable snapserver.service
sudo systemctl enable mopidy.service

sudo systemctl restart snapserver.service
sudo systemctl restart mopidy.service

If things are looking correctly, my next step is….

sudo mopidyctl local scan

Well, it almost worked right on the first try. I also needed to do this:

echo "fs.protected_fifos = 0" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/snapcast-unprotect-fifo.conf
sudo sysctl --system

Hooray! My streaming music server is up and running within my local network. This was fun. 🙂

Home alarm clock update – now with streaming audio

As mentioned in Home alarm clock update, I’d like to work with Snapcast.

Well, right off the bat, all the instructions for getting the Snapcast client to work automatically, did not. When I say “automatically” I mean that after I reboot the machine, I simply want the Snapcast client running without me having to do anything else. There were suggestions about making it a system service, and a user service, and none of those worked. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my logged-in user having an environment which is different from what systemd or cron sees.

KAlarm to the rescue!

It has an option to launch stuff after reboot. That’s what I needed.

snapclient --host <IP address of MPD server goes here>

It does take a few seconds after reboot for KAlarm to figure out to run this command. But as soon as it does, my machine (whichever machine) taps into the stream, and music starts playing out. But because KAlarm doesn’t launch until after everything in KDE is up and running, I’m not having these weird errors where the Snapcast client cannot see the stream or the audio devices to play it out.

This is great.

However, what about my alarms? Those are music files too (well, sometimes a TTS wave file). The multiplexing nature of computer audio would have the two playing simultaneously. That is less than ideal.

Turns out that VLC has an option for exiting nicely after playing a file. Add a couple of MPC commands, and we’re golden. The magic command for VLC is rc --play-and-exit

I did have to install the MPC client (for controlling MPD servers) on my machines.

But now my KAlarm commands look like this:

mpc --host <IP address> pause
vlc --intf rc --play-and-exit /path/to/friday_morning.pls
mpc --host <IP address> play

I can queue up a whole stream of music files as background music, using Cantata, and when it comes time for my alarm to fire, to let me know it is time for the next event, the background music pauses through the whole house, the alarm does its thing, and then the background music resumes.

This is so neat. I am having fun with my computers again. 🙂

And I enjoy hearing the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing Sonic the Hedgehog: a Symphonic Suite and Elder Scrolls – Skyrim: Far Horizons. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Original Game Soundtrack has some great orchestral music. And now my whole house is filled with it.

Raspberry Pi MPD server

Notes about starting fresh on a Raspberry Pi and making a Music Player Daemon (MPD) server out of it.

New image preparation

I did use the Raspberry Pi Imager program and put the base Debian with no desktop environment on the SD card. I did use the customizer to put a user and password on it.

I also have put the MAC in my DHCP server so that the Pi gets a static IP address, and I put an entry in DNS so that IP address maps to the host name I want.

First, an update:

sudo apt-get update

Then I install vim. The default is to use nano, but I like vim.

sudo apt-get install vim -y

Followed by

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Choice 3 picks vim as my editor.

Followed by turning off Wi-Fi. For music streaming, I only want the Raspberry Pi to be hard-wired into the network.

sudo vim /boot/firmware/config.txt

At the very bottom, I added this to the config.txt file:

dtoverlay=disable-wifi

It goes underneath the [all] section. Then I reboot and log in, and perform

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

Now I get to install my favorite aliases and history search keystrokes. These are detailed here.

The next steps are so that I can do ssh from my main machine. I followed this, although I wanted to set a root user password first:

sudo passwd root

Then I mostly followed these steps: New Debian install; ssh and sudo changes

Then I did the ssh-copy-id thing and changed Password Authentication back to no in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Start with the MPD install

The documentation says that the version of MPD that one can install from the Debian repositories is out of date. I can confirm that.

However, going through those motions sets things up well for later.

apt install mpd -y

Followed by

apt install snapserver -y

The Snapcast server needs to be configured to look to MPD for the sound source.

vim /etc/snapserver.conf

to say:

[stream]  
source = pipe:///tmp/snapfifo?name=MPD

That line was already there, except the name= was default instead of MPD

So later I get to download the latest .tar.xy file, and copy it to the Raspberry Pi. Then:

tar xf mpd-version.tar.xz
cd mpd-version

At this point, I should simply point you at https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user.html

There’s a whole bit about apt install meson g++ pkgconf \ and some whole bunches of packages. Then there’s the compile after that. 696 things it compiles.

After all that is done, it is time to update the /etc/mpd.conf file.

This is what mine looks like with the comments stripped out:

music_directory       "/var/lib/mpd/music"
playlist_directory    "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
db_file               "/var/lib/mpd/tag_cache"

state_file            "/var/lib/mpd/state"
sticker_file          "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.sql"

user                  "mpd"
bind_to_address       "0.0.0.0"
port                  "6600"

auto_update           "yes"
auto_update_depth     "0"

zeroconf_enabled      "yes"
zeroconf_name         "Music Player @ %h"

input {
        plugin        "curl"
}

decoder {
        plugin        "hybrid_dsd"
        enabled       "no"
}

decoder {
        plugin        "wildmidi"
        enabled       "no"
        #config_file  "/etc/timidity/timidity.cfg"
}

audio_output {
    type              "fifo"
    encoder           "flac"
    name              "snapserver"
    format            "48000:16:2"
    path              "/tmp/snapfifo"
    compression       "8"
    mixer_type        "software"
}

filesystem_charset    "UTF-8"

Eventually, we get it installed, which includes creating the /var/lib/mpd/music directory. We need that for the next step.

Access to the sound files

This took an edit of /etc/fstab although this is always more difficult than I think it should be.

I did it for Nextcloud, so it is the same thing, kind of. Nextcloud gets read/write access, where this MPD server doesn’t need to be able to write to the sound files or directory.

First, set up a credentials file, with the login name and password:

touch /root/credentials.smb
vim /root/credentials.smb
username=epstein_did_not_kill_himself
password=Apparently-Child-Rape-Is-Okay-If-0.1%-Richest-People-Opt-In-To-Doing-It,Obviously,Because-Otherwise-The-Rapists-Would-Have-Gone-To-Jail

Then we can edit /etc/fstab

//hostname/smbsharename/data /var/lib/mpd/music cifs vers=3.0,credentials=/root/credentials.smb,_netdev,iocharset=utf8 0 0

One thing that kicked my ass for a couple of hours:

vim /usr/local/lib/systemd/system/mpd.service

And on the ExecStart line, I had to explicitly add the configuration file path and file name.

So before, it looked like this:

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mpd --systemd

But that would err out with “could not find config file”. I changed it to this:

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mpd --systemd /etc/mpd.conf

And now it magically works. Of course, yesterday the first time I set it up, I had no such problems. Sigh.

I still have one more thing to add: Snapweb, where Snapcast server will show you what is currently running. I had that running yesterday, and liked it.

Home alarm clock update

I am delighted with my current home alarm clock setup.

I have the Morefine M8S N100 Alder Lake PC running Fedora Workstation KDE Spin. It is cabled into an OLED television set. I use the remote on the TV: settings > energy saving > panel > turn the panel completely off.

The Morefine M8S stands out in that crowd of machines for having active cooling, but running quiet. At the moment, they are on sale with 12 GB RAM and a 128 GB NVME drive for $170.

A full kit Raspberry Pi isn’t that much less, doesn’t have full size HDMI, isn’t running Intel hardware (super Linux compatible) and they do have that nasty problem of writing /var/log to the SD card, burning it out. The newer Pi can do an NVME drive, but that’s going to drive the cost up close to the M8S. But I digress.

The tuner part of the TV stays on all the time. The M8S is cabled to the TV via an HDMI cable. Although the OLED panel is off, the tuner keeps the HDMI port active, so the M8S doesn’t disconnect or try to rejigger the display when the panel is turned off for sleep mode.

Previously, to connect to the sound bar, I used Bluetooth, bypassing the TV. This was not great. Specifically, Bluetooth wants to disconnect if not streaming, and Linux doesn’t want to play with an audio source that isn’t there. Sure, there are kludgy ways to get it to light up for a sound, but this is clearly paddling upstream for drudgery and debt.

But I saw the Toslink optical S/PDIF connector on the sound bar, and the lightbulb went on. Feed everything in to the TV over HDMI, and feed the audio from the TV to the sound bar over Toslink. We’re back to fun and profit. Well, fun, at least.

This is working out great.

The M8S is a Nextcloud client, so it has access to my audio files directory, and via the web, the Music app player.

KAlarm on the M8S runs VideoLAN Client (VLC) headless, pointing at the audio file (or for waking up, a .pls playlist file). I have seven .pls files for seven days of the week.

I also happen to have my source files for iPhone ringtones in Nextcloud, so when I want a short alarm sound, I’ve got a passel of those available.

KAlarm lets me set schedules for every Sunday of the month. I happen to need a different schedule for the second Sunday, where the first, third, fourth, and fifth are a normal schedule.

What is super nice is that I can have Nextcloud playing music at a low volume, but when VLC kicks in, it plays at the normal volume. They don’t interrupt each other, they simply multiplex.

Lastly, I’ve been playing with Coqui TTS (text-to-speech), so sometimes the sound being played by KAlarm is a feminine Scottish voice saying “Do daily inventory”. 🙂

Next, I want to generate Westminster Chimes sound files, and have it play those on the hour. It would be fun to generate the sound file on-the-fly, starting with the announcement chime and then Coqui TTS saying “Seven” or “Noon” or “Thirteen hundred”.

A future project I have in mind is to write a Perl script to pull down my calendar out of Nextcloud, and then write entries into the KAlarm file for special events.

Also, I wouldn’t mind turning the M8S (and my other machines) into Snapcast clients.

Fun indeed.

The surveillance state makes things screwy

One of my volunteer service opportunities is to record speakers at meetings and then put the recordings on a website. I use the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, which I’ve talked about before. I take the MP3 file and edit it using Audacity, trimming off everything before and after the speaker. Then I export the audio with a smaller bitrate to make a smaller file. Lastly, I rename it and upload it.

Today, a friend called me, and asked if I could burn a recording to CD. His friend, the gentleman who spoke, is almost 80 years old, and he would be best served with a physical CD – none of this Podcast Feed nonsense or USB stick which his truck may or may not be able to use. Sure, I said. This should be easy.

Okay, first I tried Fedora Workstation KDE Spin and got errors. I tried Brasero first, but it was super grumpy. Then I tried K3B which is my old favorite, and it was grumpy too.

I gave up and went to a Windows laptop. Did I want to use Microsoft Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes?

I went with iTunes because I’m not a fan of anything Microsoft.

Freaking iTunes worked, but….

What the hell is the name on this CD?

audiocd:/Philip Kerr – 01 – Game Over – Track 01.wav?device=/dev/sr0

At 80 years old, I’d be acutely aware of my mortality.

Oh! That is certainly what I want this 80-year-old man to see when he pops this gift CD into his truck CD player display:

Philip Kerr - 01 - Game Over

If I’m him, there’s no way I don’t think to myself: What the hell? And then he’d have to say some Hail Mary’s to apologize to God for the cursing.

This gentleman’s name is not Philip Kerr. I did write his name in the various properties fields in iTunes. None of those appear to have come over.

I know that the music industry wants to keep tabs on every sound file ever, so they can in theory collect royalties. But this was my recording, done live and in-person.

This is just screwy.

And apparently, this isn’t a problem on the CD, it is a problem in Fedora. I didn’t know that yet. All I got was the Orwellian vibes.

Okay, back to Fedora KDE Spin.

Ooooooooffffffff.

Thank goodness for Perplexity.AI. It turns out to only be an 8 step problem.

One: Check group memberships – must be a member of cdrom – I’m good

Two: Adjust K3B settings

K3B > Settings > Configure K3B > Programs > Permissions > Change Permissions > Apply

Three: Add a system policy

sudo vim /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/85-cdrecord.rules
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-system" &&
        subject.isInGroup("cdrom")) {
        return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
});

Four: Restart services

sudo systemctl restart polkit

Five: Update udev rules

sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-cd-burner.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr[0-9]*", MODE="0660", GROUP="cdrom"

Six: Reload udev rules

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Seven: reboot the computer.

Eight: try to burn the CD with K3B.

Thank goodness it worked.

I had forgotten that CDs are as small as they are. The older gentleman actually had two recordings on file, one for 45 minutes and another for 55 minutes. That’s too much for a single audio CD. Heh.

Text-to-speech notes

This is simply for my own notes, on how to do Coqui text-to-speech

Initial setup required this:

python -m venv tts_env
source tts_env/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install coqui-tts

Subsequent invocations needed only this:

python -m venv tts_env
source tts_env/bin/activate

tts --text "Insert text here" --model_name tts_models/en/jenny/jenny --pipe_out --out_path /home/path/to/tts_output/whatever.wav | aplay


How to make (whatever) Linux have a nice bash shell with my favorite aliases

This is a newer version of my post How to make Ubuntu have a nice bash shell like OpenSuSE which should supersede it. I keep coming back to this topic, and think that the right way to do this is:

touch ~/.bash_aliases
vim ~/.bash_aliases
alias ll='ls -la'
alias ..='cd ..'

And then alter .bashrc to include this aliases file:

vim ~/.bashrc

At the end of the file, insert this:

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
    . ~/.bash_aliases
fi

Finally, reload bash with this:

source ~/.bashrc

The other change I always make is to edit /etc/inputrc and make the history search keys the PgUp key.

sudo vim /etc/inputrc

Find # "\e[5~": history-search-backward and uncomment it

New Fedora KDE Spin: re-do power saving setting

There is a bug in my AMD Ryzen 1700 which manifests on Linux during power sleep states. Now that I’m on Fedora KDE Spin, I need to implement it again. Fedora KDE Spin does startup scripts a little differently than the previous systems I’ve used before.

Previously, I’d used /etc/init.d/

Well, Fedora KDE Spin doesn’t use that; it uses Systemd and systemctl

As root:

cd /etc/systemd/system

vim set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.service

Paste in the following:

[Unit]
Description=Set C6 ACPI State Disabled
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /home/bazoozle/zenstates.py --c6-disable

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Technically, I don’t need to wait until after the network is started to run the zenstates.py python script. But it isn’t obvious what would be the equivalent to @reboot in a crontab.

Then we do this:

systemctl start set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.service

systemctl enable set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.service

Migrated from Manjaro to Fedora KDE Spin on my main machine

Around six months ago, I migrated my main machine to Manjaro, as mentioned here. I liked it, and I liked it enough that I also switched to using it as my home media PC / alarm clock.

It has been great, using it as my alarm clock. I don’t think I’ve been happier with my alarm clock setup, ever. The interface of using KAlarm is super easy, and as a proper calendar ought to, it can handle “second Sunday of the month” or “on the 15th of the month” events (for example). That Manjaro hooks into the high-quality audio on the soundbar I use on my television, makes the music it plays a joy to wake up to.

Alas, on my main machine, I drive Manjaro harder, and it crashes.

Of course, I have a lot more installed on my main machine. I do more with ImageMagick, Tesseract OCR, The GIMP, Kdenlive, and Mozilla Thunderbird. Although I have webmail, my primary interface to my mail server is Thunderbird. I like Thunderbird enough that I do a monthly donation to the project to help keep it going.

Both machines have the Nextcloud client on them; that’s how I get the MP3 files to the alarm clock PC. But I tend to do more file organizing on my main machine than on the alarm clock PC.

I don’t do Discord on the alarm clock PC, and I do on my main PC.

The problem I was experiencing with Manjaro was that I’d click on something, and then Manjaro would crash to reboot.

The crash to reboot would happen maybe twice or thrice a week. This last Sunday, it did again, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so-to-speak.

What to move to? Although OpenSuSE has always been super stable, I still dislike how woke they’ve gone. Also, the last time I tried to install from an ISO of theirs, there was definitely something broken in the image.

I decided to try the Fedora KDE Spin. So far, I like it. It did present a couple of problems, however.

The first was that after I rebooted, I changed /home to mount to my second hard drive and I rebooted again. I could not log in as me. I could log in as root, but attempting to log in as me failed. In the journalctl the message was that an attempt to cd to my home drive failed, due to permissions.

I was fortunate that (logged in as root) the very first search I did found a Stack Overflow article which showed that the /home ownership had the wrong owner. I wish I could find that article now, so I could link to it. Anyway, the solution was:

restorecon -Rv /home

from the command line. I was already logged in as root, so I didn’t need sudo. If I could have gotten logged in as me, I wouldn’t have needed restorecon.

The second problem was that Firefox does not come with all the codecs for playing multimedia preinstalled. Manjaro did this beautifully. OpenSuSE is like Fedora this way, but it is easier to solve on OpenSuSE.

I ended up having to do a Firefox Refresh, which is less than fun. All my Multi-Account Containers now need to be redone, and I have a lot of them.

There are only two things that I don’t like about moving to this Fedora KDE spin.

One is that I have two monitors, and every time I move the mouse between them, something in KDE Plasma wants to “stick” the mouse cursor to the boundary between the two. I have to push the mouse an extra bit, to push past the current monitor and to the next one. I haven’t taken the time to find out if there is an easy fix for this, but I suspect that there is.

The other is that in Thunderbird, apparently Tools > Message Filters are stored in the Thunderbird directory and not in my user profile. This isn’t Fedora’s fault; it is something in Thunderbird.

I did choose to install the non-Flatpak version of Thunderbird, because I don’t like Flatpak. I have no idea if me keeping everything in my /home on a separate hard drive plays nice with Flatpak. Admittedly, I have not done the research. But it seems to me that when one changes distributions with significantly different packaging (rpm versus deb versus tar) that Flatpak would be a problem. I don’t know, but I doubted that Flatpak was the universal image for all Linux’s forever. Wasn’t Snap supposed to be that? (I don’t like Snap, either).

Anyway, I had more than 30 message filters, some with 20 email addresses in them, for filtering my mail into folders. Those message filters are gone. Rats!

I am thrilled to find the Thunderbird Add-On quickFilters which is delightful.

I do like how Fedora KDE Spin puts the OK and Open buttons in the upper-right corner of dialog boxes instead of the lower right.

I’m giving up on Apple HomeKit

My setup for Apple HomeKit was an iPad, a HomePod Mini, and my personal iPhone. The iPad was where I would configure Shortcuts > Automation > Personal Automation, which would light up Bluetooth and play playlists. My goal was to replace my Amazon gear as my home alarm clock. The Amazon Echo system started well, but enshitification happened, and I removed all that gear from my life.

The HomeKit solution mostly worked, except when it didn’t. The iPad would, once in a while, simply register an error instead of doing the automation task. It can be a real bummer when your alarm clock doesn’t go off. I lived with the poor behavior because it only happened every week or two or so. But I had a nagging feeling that long term, this is not going to be acceptable to me. Computers can be reliable, and I’m not willing to pay Apple’s price for an Apple TV. I think I confused the Mac Mini with the Apple TV; the Apple TV is about the same price as what I went with later.

Speaking of which, I’ve abandoned the low quality competitor, too: my Roku Ultra is powered off and headed for the scrap heap.

The thing that kicked my ass into gear on abandoning HomeKit was the most recent upgrade of iPadOS. I forget if it was 18.1 or 18.2, but after the upgrade, all my playlists were empty. The MP3 files are still on the iPad, but the playlists I’d programmed into Apple Music were empty. Would I like to add my music from the Apple iTunes store? Go kick rocks. I copied the MP3 files to the box for a reason.

So now I have a choice: recreate the playlists on a box I don’t think is going to work out in the long run, or, start over on something new.

I chose to start over on something new.

Nicely enough, my brother gave me a great Christmas gift last year: the Morefine M8S N100 Alder Lake PC. My brother specifically looked for one of these because a reviewer he listens to said this small form factor PC is one of the quietest boxes with active cooling, and specifically is Linux compatible. I wiped Windows off of it and installed Manjaro Linux, just like my main desktop. The HDMI on it drives my television (monitor) and I use Bluetooth to connect to the soundbar.

As mentioned in the Home alarm clock: no progress post, I’m not having success running it headless. So why not go whole hog in the other direction? I have a work-around: turn the display panel off. I have to use the TV remote to pull up the menu which lets me power down the display panel. If I want to see the screen again, I use the remote. Other than that, the Morefine M8S is a normal Linux desktop driving a television set, and the television set never turns off (well, the electronics driving the tuner / HDMI ports, at least). This also lets me use Rumble as a YouTube replacement, with a wireless mouse and keyboard from my bed. But I digress.

I’m using KAlarm to run commands on a schedule. The commands are:

vlc --intf dummy /path/to/music/playlist.file

And so far, it hasn’t failed to play an alarm yet.

A bonus feature I didn’t expect: the alarm music sounds better. Of course it does, an iPad playing an MP3 to a soundbar doesn’t do 5.1 stereo; but Manjaro on the Morefine M8S does know how to send that type of stream over Bluetooth. My guess is that Apple was nerfing the MP3s in favor of AAC from the Apple iTunes store; I don’t know. But I do know that the new setup simply sounds way better.

And a future bonus feature will be that I could write a Perl script to replace the contents of the .pls or .m3u files if a desire for variety should strike me.

The only downside has been that the HomePod Mini is now kind of useless. It was nice, having the automation on the iPad to be able to play something in either the soundbar in my bedroom (mornings and evenings) or the HomePod Mini in the living room near my main PC (lunch break times).

I am going to flash a Raspberry Pi with Homebridge, but I don’t know if that will let me send a VLC stream to the HomePod.

Still, I have a great setup for watching Rumble or such while I fold my laundry, listen to a podcast to fall asleep to, and I have faith that my alarms will no longer fail me.