Home audio network finally affordable
I’ve always wanted to be able to stream music from a central location to anywhere in my house. Ideally, I’d like to play the music on my computer through my home stereo. I thought I’d start by spending part of July 4th getting DAAP–the audio sharing protocol used by iTunes–running on my Ubuntu Dapper box. This was pretty painless, as I found a few other people who have done it with mt-daapd. Installing it and setting it up was a breeze, with the exception that I didn’t enable ogg and flac when I ran the initial configure script. After mt-daapd was installed and running, I went to another computer in the house and fired up Rhythmbox, which now ships with DAAP capability. Rhythmbox immediately found my shared music and I was finally able to enjoy my music in the basement without having to lug a boombox and cd’s around.
Since I couldn’t rightly leave things as they were, I had to poke around the mt-daapd forums a bit. That’s when I started piecing together that mt-daapd is now called the Firefly Media Server, and that there’s a product out there called SoundBridge that will connect to a server running mt-daapd/Firefly and your home stereo, allowing you to stream your music from computer to stereo. SoundBridge will work with wireless (and WEP, but not WPA) and wired home networks. Best of all, the price is right: models run from $150-$200.
The last time I checked this market, devices were too complicated, restrictive, and expensive. Now I can play my music in my format (ogg and flac) and all I need to buy is the hardware–the bridge–to go from computer to stereo.
I’ll be making a trip to Best Buy this weekend. 
One last note: SoundBridge doesn’t play ogg and flac natively, those formats have to be transcoded by the server to wav format. Apparently there are patches out there to transcode from ogg to wav to mp3 to reduce bandwidth. I believe Slim Devices Squeezebox will play ogg and flac files natively.
