Hello Community,
At home, I run Snapcast as my main audio distribution system. My Problem - i was not able to “pair” my plex sound output on a headless Raspberry (and have a cool remote feature). Now Plexamp solved my problem. Its a little complicated but the result is - from my point of view - awesome.
First of all, this is a hack based on plexamp-v1.0.5-pi.tar.gz and a running snapcast setup. Why, because it is using my favorite audio player mpd 
. I don’t know if modern versions still use mpd.
Second - I use a raspberry pi 3 with the latest raspbian in my setup
My long Way … ( if you don’t like to read this scolle down to the HowTo)
At the beginning I followed the install instructions of elan in his post. Spoiler: It was not running as expected. Reason: the bundled mpd was not started correctly. After getting it running ( LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/pi/plexamp/resources/helpers/linux-arm ./mpd mpd.conf) I found out that the bundled mpd has no support for fifo output.
So I tried to use the regular mpd from the debian/raspbian-repos. I used the bundled mpd config - changed the audio output to a pipe - and started the the repo-mpd with the config - success - the node server was able to connect - time for music right now …
Not.
Next Problem - no music at all - f***. Thanks to the user StalkerSVR - he describes in his post how to get around the problem.
Again fire-ing up the node server and - drum roll - it works.
After some cleanup i can present the following HowTo
HowTo:
- Configure Plexamp and MPD
- Login to your Raspberry and install all the necessary things (nodejs and repo-mpd)
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_9.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install -y nodejs mpd
- Download Plexamp and extract it
wget https://files.plexapp.com/elan/plexamp-v1.0.5-pi.tar.gz
tar -xzvf plexamp-v1.0.5-pi.tar.gz
- Change the the bundled mpd.conf for the use with snapcast
nano plexamp/resources/helpers/linux-arm/mpd.conf .
- change audio output in the mpd.conf to a pipe and leave the rest unchanged!!!
audio_output {
type “fifo”
name “my pipe”
path “/tmp/plexfifo”
format “48000:16:2”
mixer_type “software”
}
- copy it to /etc/ and correct the permissions
sudo cp mpd.conf /etc/
sudo chown mpd:audio /etc/mpd.conf
- for some systemd-foobar deactivate the mpd.service and the mpd.socket in systemd - otherwise the setup will not survive a restart … we will reactivate it later via rc.local
sudo systemctl disable mpd.service
sudo systemctl disable mpd.socket
- patch the server.prod.js in /home/pi/plexamp/server/ as mentioned in the post of StalkerSVR (I uploaded an already patched version: server.prod.js.patched.tar.gz (693.4 KB))
tar -xzvf server.prod.js.patched.tar.gz
cp server.prod.js.patched /home/pi/plexamp/server/server.prod.js
- Move everything to /opt/plexamp (I like my system cleaned up
)
sudo mkdir /opt/plexamp
sudo cp /home/pi/plexamp /opt/plexamp
yes - this results in /opt/plexamp/plexamp/ … for reason - I like to have my files on one place were i find them again
- create a directory for the server.json and link it to the directory /home/pi/.config/Plexamp
sudo mkdir /opt/plexamp/config
mkdir /home/pi/.config
ln -s /opt/plexamp/config /home/pi/.config/Plexamp
chown -R pi:pi /opt/plexamp
- copy your server.json from an existing Plexamp Setup to the created directory
scp :~/.config/server.json /opt/plexamp/config/
- edit the systemd service plexamp.service to use the new directory
nano /opt/plexamp/plexamp/plexamp.service
change the ExecStart parameter to "/usr/bin/node /opt/plexamp/plexamp/server/server.prod.js
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /opt/plexamp/plexamp/server/server.prod.js
- copy the systemd service plexamp.service to your systemd directory
sudo cp /opt/plexamp/plexamp/plexamp.service /lib/systemd/system
- Configure the server of SnapCast
- For the first run we create the fifo and the permissions by hand - later (the history command is your friend) we copy the same commands to /etc/rc.local
mkfifo /tmp/plexfifo
chown snapserver:snapserver /tmp/plexfifo
chmod 777 /tmp/plexfifo
- now we copy the same commands to the /etc/rc.local
nano /etc/rc.local
- add the following commands
mkfifo /tmp/plexfifo
chown snapserver:snapserver /tmp/plexfifo
chmod 777 /tmp/plexfifo
systemctl start mpd # mpd is started here for some systemd foobar
systemctl start plexamp # plexamp is started here for some systemd foobar
- open the snapserver config …
nano /etc/default/snapserver
- … and add the the plexfifo to the server options
-s pipe:///tmp/plexfifo?name=Plex&sampleformat=48000:16:2&mode=read
- Start the beast
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start mpd
sudo systemctl start plexamp
sudo systemctl restart snapserver
-
Pray
-
If you have done everything right you can fire up a plexamp on your desktop or the plexapp on your phone - start a song, change the output to the plexamp player on your raspberry and enjoy the feeling of having the music everywhere
-
Troubleshooting
As always the are minimal mistakes done by everyone (that includes me!). At first - start every service on a seperate console and check for errors
- for plexamp use the following command as the user pi
/usr/bin/node /opt/plexamp/plexamp/server/server.prod.js
Check for errors like
error: [MPD] Error connecting:Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:36600
If thats the case - mpd is not reachable
check you mpd config / disable mpd socket and service
- for mpd use the command as user pi
mpd --no-deamon /etc/mpd.conf
- A good hint that something is going wrong is when mpd is not running on localhost:36600 - in that case check if you disabled mpd via systemd (this error costs me 1-2 h)
systemctl stop mpd.service
systemctl stop mpd.socket
systemctl disable mpd.service
systemctl disable mpd.socket
systemctl start mpd.service
If ss -pant tells you that mpd is listening on localhost:36600 mpd is not the show stopper
ss -pant
LISTEN 0 5 127.0.0.1:36600 : users:((“mpd”,pid=487,fd=9))
-
Check your rc.local - is the snapfifo create - are the permissions ok - ist mpd started in the rc.local ?
-
Everything Ok - but I still don’t hear anything - CHeck if you changed to the right output in snapcast
Kind Regards
ChewyF5
P.S.:
Files i created / used in this HowTo
- server.prod.js.patched.tar.gz (693.4 KB)
- mpd.conf.tar.gz (343 Bytes)
- rc.local.tar.gz (452 Bytes)
.
