USB Sound streamer, possible?

[hertzsae]

I was wondering if anyone had tried to get a USB sound card to work and stream music too it. I have Airport Express envy. I know DVD Jon has hacked it, but think it's a waste to get it when the router could possibly stream music too. Anyhow, I'm just seeing if anyone had thought of doing it, or wondering if it is even possible. I have had trouble just finding a usb sound card with linux drivers.

[rdk]

perhaps this page helps...

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...dule=usb-audio

I currently use a Gigaport USB Soundcard on my Ibook with OSX. But if there is a possibility to use the WL500 to stream music this would be great!!

Cheers
Rainer

[hertzsae]

Sorry for not being more clear, I don't have the wl500g, yet! My current 3yr old router isn't forwarding ports correctly to my server so my friends have trouble connecting. I lost 2 ports to an electrical storm 2yrs ago and I think it's about time to replace it. I love hackable products and had been looking at the Linksys wrt54g. Then I found out about the wl500g and I started thinking of all the other possibilities the usb port adds. I don't even have anything wireless, but since I don't know of any wired only routers that you can hack into with usb ports I'm looking at getting wl500g. I usually like to ask a lot of questions before I buy, so sorry that I can't help expirement with it yet.

The gigaport looks awsome, but is out my price range. I'm looking more at the $40usd price range for the sound device. It looks like using the link you provided, it might be possible to get an inexpensive one working. I'd love to hear if anyone gets it working!

[Oleg]

wl500gx will have some kind of audio streaming, at least in contains bplay sound application.

[WlanMan]

bplay ?? Very Cool

The 500g is on its way to me, i couldn´t wait for the 500gx .
The 500g maybe can play MP3 up to 128kbit, but this most likely will load the 125Mhz Cpu to 100%. (What will be not that Problem of you only use it in Wlan Slave mode as a Wireless Streaming Radio Player for example ) This configuration should have also a lower price as commercial-avaliable wlan radio players .

Most USB Audio devices are compilant to a single Specifikation, so it should work on the wl500. I have a Sample of an usb audio chip, need to solder it together with a few compenents to bring it to life .

Btw, if you have no Wlan Cards and dont Plan to get some AND you have no intererest in running an open NoCat gateway for Public (but filtered!) access, you can rip the Wlan Card out of your Router when it comes and sell it (possible to me ), because its seated in a minipci socket. There you can install anything you get in minipci form, whats mostly wlan cards but possible other interesting stuff can be bought...

[hertzsae]

I plan to play the mp3's from my computer in the other room and stream them to the router. So that should work no matter what the bitstream i'm assuming. Good luck on the soldered usb chip. I don't really feal like waiting for the gx box myself either. I need some tunes in my living room. I'm excited to hear how it goes.

[Nenik]

The 500g maybe can play MP3 up to 128kbit, but this most likely will load the 125Mhz Cpu to 100%.

OK, boys, I've thought about this kind of usage already when I was buying it and I've already started experimenting.


Short summary:
wl500g is able to decode 192kbit at ~50% CPU usage.

Long summary:
The box has no FPU and emulation would be too slow, so you need
to use integer-only decoding algorithm. I've picked libmad+madplay and crosscompiled them for the box (statically for now and it wasn't that easy). Playing in streaming mode to /dev/null resulted in 2x speed decoding (so it needs only 50% CPU when decoding realtime). I currently have no USB audio device but I'm certainly going to order one. Sending the data over USB should have neglible impact on the box throughput as it is mostly DMA, so I expect it would work OK.

I've also tried to write the decoded PCM stream to USB device.
The stream was playable OK back on the PC (so it decodes correctly)
but my flashdisk was too slow to handle writing the PCM stream in real time.

[Thijsje]

Just received my usb 2 channel soundcard from conrad.
(dutch order info: 994248-8A 2 KANAL SOUND ADAPTER ZWART)

plugged it into my wl-500g and installed the asus software. After starting up an mp3 with mediaplayer the music came out of the usb adapter and sounded really good on my stereo. I'm sure it's not high quality, but I don't hear the difference. It's a lot better for me than plugging in a cable into my wireless laptop.

:-)

Thijs.

[gwl]

How can I play a live radio stream with the router?

I know I can do: wget <stream>
which records into a file, untill i stop it with ctrl+c
and then: madplay <file>

but, I'd like to play the streamed file directly...
how can this be done?

thanks

[MMCM]

How can I play a live radio stream with the router?

I know I can do: wget <stream>
which records into a file, untill i stop it with ctrl+c
and then: madplay >file>

but, I'd like to play the streamed file directly...
how can this be done?

thanks

You could use a pipe to between wget and madplay:

wget -q -O - http://your.url.com | madplay /proc/self/fd/0
or
wget -q -O - http://your.url.com | madplay -

[gwl]

You could use a pipe to between wget and madplay:

wget -q -O - http://your.url.com | madplay /proc/self/fd/0
or
wget -q -O - http://your.url.com | madplay -

thanks MMCM.. now it's working perfectly..
I had tried the second pipe before, but forgot the "-" at the end of madplay.. so it didn't work..


To someone who might be interested, here's a tiny script to play a web radio station (from sky.fm):
>1st, go to http://www.sky.fm and save the .pls for the station you want. (use the 96k winamp icon link)
for example: wget http://www.sky.fm/mp3/tophits.pls
>now, create a script with:

url=`grep File1 $1 | cut -c7-`
echo $1 - $url
wget $url -O - | madplay -

(don't forget to: chmod 755 script)

and now run it with:
./your_script tophits.pls

enjoy...