Nuts and Volts - August 2015

Most of the configuration items are set to reasonable initial values, but some must be tailored to your specific environment. At a minimum, the following two items must be set:

wifi_network = your_wifi_
  networks_SSID
wifi_password = your_wifi_
  networks_password

■ Figure 2. Music player schematic.

Set the wifi_network value to the

SSID of your Wi-Fi network and set the wifi_password entry to the password of your Wi-Fi network.

Software Preparation and Configuration

Since I like to be able to remotely log in to the RPi in the music player, I always enable SSH (Secure Shell) as follows:

enable_ssh = true

For this part of the process, you will need a computer system that is capable of writing to a microSD card ( 2 GB minimum size), and that is connected to the Internet and able to download files.

The first item of business is to download the Pi MusicBox software from www.woutervanwijk.nl/ pimusicbox/musicbox0.6.zip. This is a rather large file, so it will take some time to download. Once downloaded, unzip the file to get the file “ musicbox0.6.img” contained within. This is the operating system's image file that must be transferred to the microSD card. How this is done depends on the computer system you are using. For instructions on how to do this on your computer, go to http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup.

Pi MusicBox must scan local and networked music files before they will be selectable in the web user interface. Scanning can take a long time if there are a lot of music files to process. If your music library is very dynamic, uncomment the scan_always entry which will cause a rescan every time your music device is powered up. If your music library is relatively static, set scan_once to true:

scan_once = false
#scan_always = true

The Pi MusicBox software uses a file named settings.ini for all of its configuration settings. The file is structured as a Windows ini file where all lines starting with a are comments. Comments within the configuration file describe each configurable item, so read the comments carefully. Some configuration lines are commented out by default, so if you want to use them, remove the at the beginning of the line.

Then, when the Pi MusicBox software runs, it will scan your music library once and then reset scan_once to false automatically. If you add new music to your library, set scan_once to true again and reboot.

Hardware Configuration

Once the Pi MusicBox software is operational, you can manipulate the configuration settings online through the web interface. It is also possible to enable SSH in the Pi MusicBox software so the configuration file can be accessed and manipulated remotely by logging into the RPi (default username: root; password: musicbox) and using an editor like Nano or Vi to edit the configuration In my music player, I used a 64 GB USB Flash drive for holding my complete music library. As mentioned, I copied my entire i Tunes music directory to this device so I would have local access to all of my digitized music. Before doing this, however, I had to reformat the Flash drive into plain FAT32 format. This was necessary because the Flash drive I used came formatted as exFAT which the Pi MusicBox software does not support natively.

/boot/config/ settings.ini.

You can also edit the Pi MusicBox settings file directly on the SD memory card before the card is inserted into the RPi. To do this, put the SD card into your computer and open the contents of the file /config/ settings.ini with your favorite text editor.

Once I had formatted the Flash drive, it was an easy — but long — process to copy the music files ( 33 GB total). Once you are finished with copying, make sure to properly eject the USB Flash drive so as not to corrupt it accidentally when you unplug it from your computer.