Vinyl Streamer

A lightweight, local-network streaming service that captures analog audio from a turntable and broadcasts it over the network using Icecast. Listen to your vinyl records in real-time from any device in your home.

🎛️ Hardware Prerequisites

To build this streaming node, you will need the following physical components:

Raspberry Pi: A Raspberry Pi 3B, 4, or Zero 2 W is recommended, along with a reliable power supply and MicroSD card.
USB Audio Interface (ADC): A device to convert the analog audio to a digital signal for the Pi. (e.g., Behringer UCA202, ART USB Phono Plus, or a HiFiBerry DAC+ ADC hat).
Turntable: Your vinyl record player.
Phono Preamplifier: Required to boost the turntable's low-level phono signal to a standard line-level signal. Note: You can skip this if your turntable has a built-in preamp or if your USB audio interface includes a dedicated phono stage.
RCA Cables: To connect the turntable/preamp to the audio interface.

💻 Software Prerequisites

The streamer relies on two core pieces of software: a capture/encoding client and a broadcast server.

Linux OS: A headless Linux distribution like Raspberry Pi OS Lite or a customized container environment.
ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture): Standard Linux sound drivers to detect and manage the USB audio interface (alsa-utils).
Darkice: The streaming client. It captures the live audio from the ALSA device, encodes it (to MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc.), and sends it to the server. (Note: Liquidsoap is a powerful alternative to Darkice if you want to implement advanced scripting, like silence detection).
Icecast2: The streaming media server. It receives the encoded stream from Darkice and serves it to network clients (browsers, media players, smart speakers) via a local HTTP URL.

🚀 Installation & Setup

Option A: Bare-Metal Package Installation

Update your system and install the required packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install alsa-utils darkice icecast2

Configure Icecast by following the prompts to set your broadcast passwords.
Identify your USB audio device using arecord -l to find the correct ALSA card number.
Edit the /etc/darkice.cfg file to link your hardware capture device to the Icecast server.

Option B: Docker Compose Deployment

If you prefer a containerized homelab setup, you can deploy the stack using Docker Compose.

docker-compose.yml

services:
  icecast:
    image: infiniteproject/icecast
    container_name: vinyl-icecast
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    environment:
      - ICECAST_SOURCE_PASSWORD=hackme
      - ICECAST_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin
      - ICECAST_PASSWORD=hackme
      - ICECAST_RELAY_PASSWORD=hackme
    restart: unless-stopped

  darkice:
    image: pltnk/darkice
    container_name: vinyl-darkice
    devices:
      - /dev/snd:/dev/snd  # Pass through the ALSA audio device
    volumes:
      - ./darkice.cfg:/etc/darkice.cfg:ro
    depends_on:
      - icecast
    restart: unless-stopped

(Ensure your ALSA device is mapped correctly and your darkice.cfg points to the icecast container hostname).

🎧 Listening to the Stream

Once the services are running and a record is spinning, you can access the stream from any device on your local network by pointing your browser or a network media player to:

http://<RASPBERRY_PI_IP>:8000/vinyl

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