A Musical Interlude

“Some people don't dance, if they don't know who's singing,
Why ask your head, it's your hips that are swinging”

- Propellerheads: History Repeating

I had quietly assumed that Hi-Fi had almost stopped progressing, and switched to looking at multi-room, sound - thinking that was a better use of my energy than trying to optimise sound quality.

Nope.

In a rare moment of clarity, I decided to have good sound in one spot, instead of mediocre sound everywhere. A bit of time down the rabbit-hole told me that at ‘entry level’, active speakers (ones with a built in amplifier) were the way to go. That reduced the problem to finding a way to send files to the speakers. Long story short, Volumio was the answer.

Volumio is a bit-perfect music player. Bit-perfect just means that an exact copy of the music file is sent to the speaker. If your file is good, and the speaker is good, things are good.

Once things were all set up, the only thing that was bothering us was the need to go to a busy web interface to do stuff. We just wanted to press play and then every now and again, glance at what was playing.

We made something. We called it Palomino, which is the name of a pretty white and golden horse, and as a bonus, rhymes with Volumio. Here’s a link to a video of it. All code is, as usual on GitHub.

(Sidenote: The display doesn’t have the second-by-second progress bar that is commonly on-screen in such things. In spite of the Propellerheads’ valid point, we do like to know who is singing but we’ve never wondered how far through the song they are).