Store background music sucks - but not anymore.

I just finished building a cute little pianobar player for our stores at Ed Wyse on equipment that was being retired. With these, no more staticy radio, listening to the same stack of cd’s over and over again, or employee’s ipods (sorry for the store that had to listen to mine, funny that you didn’t notice Pac-Man Fever for two days though).

It’s running ttylinux for the most part. Several of the dependencies I pulled from fedora rpms or rpmfusion’s, and I compiled pianobar on a 32 bit fedora vm. There’s supposed to be a way to build this all from within ttylinux, but I was up against a deadline and had to just make it work.

I decided on Pandora for our music source because I knew about the pianobar player that would work from a command line and doesn’t require flash. Since we’re paying for Pandora One, there shouldn’t be any issues with commercials. The GM can access the account from anywhere, and can manage the playlist. When special events come, she can even set up different playlists and we can switch to those just on the correct days.

Since it’s going over an overhead speaker system, I had to figure out how to join the stereo output from Pandora into a mono signal. Here’s the foo that made that happen (I couldn’t find it when I googled).

asound.conf:

pcm.!default {  
    type plug  
    slave.pcm "mono"  
}  
pcm.mono {  
    type route  
    slave {  
        pcm mixer  
        channels 2  
    }   
    ttable.0.0 0.5  
    ttable.0.1 0.5  
    ttable.1.0 0.5  
    ttable.1.1 0.5  
}  
pcm.mixer {  
    type hw  
    card 0  
}

The rest was fairly simple. I wrapped pianobar in an init script and it’s off and running.

Next, build an api so I can control all the stores from a centralized web page, and report playlists.