raspberry pi upnp

btw i also have another question - sorry if i asked this before and somebody already answered  : is internet required for streaming music to the unitiqute?

ie if i have my laptop with external harddisk or a nas hooked to the router and the router hardwired to the unitiquite, can streaming happen without the internet? 

appreciate the feedback.

Check out http://minimserver.com/install-raspbian.html

Should be no issue installing MinimServer on a Raspberry Pi with a USB drive attached.

Yes, very straightforward.... I use samba to mount the disks on my Pi that can be elsewhere on the home  network, and run both Asset and Minimserver on the Pi. You could equally mount a USB memory stick on to your Pi.. once mounted that looks the same as networked attached storage.

so raspberry pi + external drive = nas ?

yea i know nas has raid etc. but i dont need that feature. just want to be able to use upnp to serve music files to the unitiqute.

btw with raspberry pi if u need to restart or refresh the upnp server, how do u do that? do u have a monitor for the raspberry pi?

You don't need a monitor or keyboard - you can use ssh, or similar, to connect to the RPi from another computer

Like the UQ 2 doesn’t the version 1 have a usb input?  I always found this to be the best quality SQ when playing stored files on both UQ2 and ND5XS. I believe there are now 1 & 2TB usb drives available so plenty of storage space. 

vtpcnk posted:

btw with raspberry pi if u need to restart or refresh the upnp server, how do u do that? do u have a monitor for the raspberry pi?

If you use MinimServer on a Pi you can download and run MinimWatch on a Windows, Mac or Linux machine. MinimWatch is effectively a monitor and controller for the remote MinimServer running on the Pi. You can use it to rescan the library, stop, start and change server parameters. It's all documented on the MinimServer site.

If you use Asset on the Pi then you can point a web browser at a specific port on the Pi (with Asset running) and you can use the Asset web interface for control.

The hard drive will probably need to be self-powered; the USB ports on the Pi (at least in its basic form) can't supply enough power.

I have an RPi3 acting as a streamer from a usb hard drive, which works fine without being self-powered.

I use an RPi running MinimServer as a UPNP server into my SuperUniti and it works very well. Simple, low cost, totally silent, minimal footprint and very low power consumption. Depending on the size of your CD collection and the file format (FLAC or WAV) you can cram quite a lot on a 128Gb USB stick, Mine is presently holding 290 CDs with probably enough space for another 50 or more in FLAC format. If thats not enough for you a 256Gb USB stick would cost you around £70.

David S

I perhaps should have qualified that on size - I think my collection was 1500 CDs - closer to 1TB.

vtpcnk posted:

hey all, i was going to get a nas, but out of the blue came across a unitiqute v1 which was brand new and couldn't resist buying that. so nas is out for the short term.

so i was thinking maybe can i have a raspberry pi running upnp and hook a external harddisk to it and hook it to the router or a switch connected to the router which is hardwired to the unitiqute.

is that a viable option?

btw i see some posts from the past where raspberry pi is being used - but with a nas. but if a nas is itself capable of running upnp, then why bring a raspberry pi into the equation?

appreciate the insights.

Sure, a Raspberry Pi 3 running MinimServer is far easier to setup and maintain than any NAS. Copy the latest Raspbian image to a 8gb or 16gb SD card (use small SD cards as this will speed up writing backup images) and install a minimal system via ssh (no need to connect keyboard, monitor or mouse to the RPi). Do not forget to install MinimWatch on a laptop (or any other computer that has access to your LAN): this will allow you to configure and upgrade MinimServer remotely. It is also very convenient to start rescans of your music collection after adding new albums.

i was thinking about this. then i thought why not hookup my laptop hosting my 2 tb drive to the switch instead?

am i getting any extra benefit by using the raspberry pi?

yea i read about the power issue of larger hard disks. but i can use a powered usb hub if i want to hook up a 2 tb hard drive to the raspberry pi, right?

vtpcnk posted:

i was thinking about this. then i thought why not hookup my laptop hosting my 2 tb drive to the switch instead?

am i getting any extra benefit by using the raspberry pi?

Your laptop would always have to be running when you want to play music. With a NAS, it stays on, so is always available, and I presume a Pi would be the same. 

I’ve always thought someone (WD etc) should make a powered 4 or 8TB external USB drive which also had a power connector for a Raspberry Pi, etc.  Keep thinking I could do a mod myself to an old drive enclosure (take a 5v feed from the internal power).

Eloise posted:

I’ve always thought someone (WD etc) should make a powered 4 or 8TB external USB drive which also had a power connector for a Raspberry Pi, etc.  Keep thinking I could do a mod myself to an old drive enclosure (take a 5v feed from the internal power).

WDLabs have a PiDrive Square enclosure that fits a 1TB PiDrive and needs only one 5V feed. I am not sure whether a 4 or 8TB drive would fit into the enclosure though.

vtpcnk posted:

i was thinking about this. then i thought why not hookup my laptop hosting my 2 tb drive to the switch instead?

am i getting any extra benefit by using the raspberry pi?

Yes, the benefits are, among others, less noise (no noise with a RPi), less power consumption, smaller size, higher system stability, easier backup (and restore), better maintainability and ... potentially better sound: with a Raspberry Pi, you can very easily switch off the interfaces that you do not need (HDMI, Bluetooth, etc., just google "Raspberry Pi Archimago CRAAP") and install a minimal system with no desktop managers, windows managers, development tools, etc. My laptop Debian/GNU Linux installation encompassess about 3000 packages, my minimal Raspbian system on the RPi less than 500. You can always hook up your laptop to a switch for testing purposes, of course. But it makes more sense to have a RPi3 hooked up and running 24/7 and use your laptop to connect to the it via ssh only if you need to do some maintenance work. I also find it useful to have another RPi directly connected to my router and to a large external drive. This allows me to backup my portable devices and access, among others, my music files and my LAN devices from abroad. This "router RPi" has been meanwhile running for about five years without faults and without requiring any maintenance.

..or you can use the piCore os and rygel streamer, which requires about 25 software packages...

NBPF, not sure how you ate using your Pi as a router, but I found the 1 and 2 (haven’t observed the 3) we’re not suited at all for that task as they had relatively low i/o bandwidth throughput which could quite easily congest and relatively low Ethernet throughputs could cause the CPU to wait on congestion.... not what you want at all.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

NBPF, not sure how you ate using your Pi as a router, but I found the 1 and 2 (haven’t observed the 3) we’re not suited at all for that task as they had relatively low i/o bandwidth throughput which could quite easily congest and relatively low Ethernet throughputs could cause the CPU to wait on congestion.... not what you want at all.

I have actually never tried to use a Pi as a router. I have wired up an RPi (model 2) to my router. This is a Fritz!Box 7490. In the router, I have opened port 22 for that RPi and I pay a DynDNS provider 1EUR a month to be able to ssh to that RPi using a static name. This way I can access the RPi (and my other LAN devices and storage) no matter whether I am at home, in my office or on holiday, in a seamless, uniform way. I manage all my backups (not only of music files) via rsync scripts and having a static name for the Rpi that is directly connected to the router is very convenient for me.

On another thread: I have another RPi (model 3, this time) that is actually set up to provide a local wireless network. It has a 500GB microSATA drive on its back with most of my music collection. However, this RPi is almost never connected to my LAN.  I take it with me when I go on holiday or when I have to spend some time at hotels or other places where I do not have access to a router. I mostly use it as a UPnP server and sometimes also as a renderer. In the latter case, I plug a Meridian Explorer portable DAC + headphones amplifier into one of its USB ports and then plug my portable headphones into the ME.