Hi, with a lot of time at home I've built an Unraid box and getting into and learning a lot of stuff.

 

Here's my deal. I'm working from home on my work laptop right next to my unraid box. I'd like to setup something on my unraid box to play music at minimum. I want to hook up my speakers to the unraid box and play music through it. It would be nice to control it through a web app. Like a stereo receiver on my unraid box.

 

I know I could setup a media server on the box and play it on other devices. That's not what I want.

 

I know I could accomplish my goals by setting up a VM and playing the music from there. I'm wondering if anyone has ideas of how to meet my goals more elegantly and lightweight, like using a docker image or something.

There isn't any audio player docker for Unraid and even if so I don't think it work since there isn't any audio device driver nor any way to control it.

 

Even your VM solution may run into problem of passing through the onboard audio device to a VM, which isn't always possible.

Some external USB soundcard also doesn't like being attached to a VM via libvirt so you might need to pass through a USB controller, again may or may not be possible.

 

It probably will save you time and effort to just get something like a Chromecast Audio. Last I had one, I was able to cast Plex to the Chromecast Audio hooked to a set of speaker.

Or hook up your speakers to your work laptop and play through a web interface from a docker on unraid.

Sound drivers need to be added to unraid for this to work, then you can simply pass "--device /dev/snd" to the docker (such as airsonic in jukebox mode).

If you consider yourself an advanced user, you could look into the custom kernel builder thread to add them yourself.

 

 

 

You could also look at running a light weight VM like libreelec (kodi), which will also give you music management and visualisation etc.

Not sure if there are any dedicated music distros out there

Edited July 28, 20205 yr by tjb_altf4

I think chromecast audio would have been my solution but they are now discontinued. For what they are going for on ebay I'm looking at a bluetooth receiver.

 

I'm not an advanced unraid user, I'd like to think I could be... I'm a software developer but all on the windows side. I'm starting to get into Linux.

 

Thanks all for the quick thoughts!