Linux media server multi-room music with an FM radio transmitter, or why setup your own radio station

After digitising our vinyl/cdroms onto disk, I had been struggling with how to solve the problem of playing and distributing our music without some of the costs and complexities of cabling or messing with the black art of 802 wireless with brick walls, hands free handsets and washing machines.

Our place is an older style double brick cement rendered place which is great for keeping us cool in summer and warm in winter, but crap for modern networking. Getting the place re-wired is planned, but given the construction, it is neither a cheap or immediate solution, so all I wanted was a simple solution for the interim, till something more comprehensive could be setup.

A re-wire would also be a prerequisite for one of the high end distributed media systems, but aside from the cost, allowing myself to being locked into one system with my home stereo just was not going to happen. The problems around DRM and copyright are enough without letting it interfere with my choice of hardware around the home.

Using 802 wireless is great for general laptop connectivity but is not as robust as cable, and however much I played with different streaming servers and buffer sizes, when the neighbours' washing machine starts the music stops. It may go for hours at a time, but having to restart the music player in the middle of a nice piece of music is quite annoying. It would not survive the better half test.

After playing with a media player and trying out one of those little radio transmitters for using it with car stereo, I wondered if the same technique could be used as a possible solution for playing our music collection in anywhere in the house. The quality of the little car transmitters was a bit crappy, and in builtup areas it is hard to find a frequency sufficiently clear to have a good signal, but maybe a better transmitter would help.

After some digging around, I found this interesting thread on the whirlpool forums, which had a reference to a transmitter by Fordray Eletronics.

Ahh, this sounds cool, and yep, a day later I was up and running my own personal FM radio station, broadcasting our music through the house and into the studio. The quality is, well, radio quality. All the same, it is great FM radio quality with stereo, and I would find it hard to tell if it was not a CD being played. People in heavily builtup areas may not have as much success due to the proximity to commercial transmitters.

A very very simple and cheap setup, just used an audio splitter cable from the headphones port on the laptop connected to the two channel inputs on the transmitter for stereo fm broadcasting. The transmitter has a small button for setting the frequency to a quiet spot, then just tune your FM Stereo in to the same frequency.

The laptop, an old Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad with Ubuntu 8.10 Ibex and enough space for the music collection, and Rythmbox, the default Ubuntu media player.

The best part is that I do not have any software tuning to syncronise multiple music player devices for whole of house sound.