Originally Posted by 300TD1982

You'll need to be (or need the assistance of) someone moderately familiar with the Linux command line and very basic electronics to do what I'm doing. Skip to the end for the easier way.

I'm using the Asus Tinkerboard SBC (single board computer). The music engine is MPD, which creates a database for the music and handles the playout. MPC is a command line program that sends simple commands to MPD.

All the single board computers have dozens of "GPIO pins". These General Purpose Input/Output pins can easily have switches attached to them. Then you use a short, simple Python script to tell MPC to tell MPD what to do when the switch is pressed. So you can hook a switch up to two GPIO pins, have a Python script that tells MPC to turn SHUFFLE on, and then MPC tells MPD to turn SHUFFLE on. You can similarly wire buttons for PLAY, PAUSE, RW, FFD, PLAY ROCK, etc.

I'm a dork so I attached a floppy drive to this. Each floppy loads a playlist that I created beforehand. When the floppy is inserted, a UDEV rule calls a script; that script reads the playlist from the floppy and passes it on to MPC, then MPC tells MPD to play it.
I don't recommend getting that complicated though unless you're also a dork.


In my house I just run MPD on an old laptop (a single board computer would work just as well). There are many graphical front ends for MPD. I use Cantata on computers and MALP on Android. Any number of devices can connect to MPD at the same time and manipulate the playlist or change the volume or whatever. MPD is a popular and very powerful piece of software and it is well documented. It runs on Windows and Android but I highly recommend installing it under Linux.