Extending the Raspberry Pi to a miniature music center
External Hard Disks
If your music library resides on an external disk or another partition, you need to mount the appropriate drive to play the tracks and update the title database. Larger external hard disks are usually formatted with NTFS. Mounting these disks, therefore, requires the NTFS driver package ntfs-3g. To get the required mount modules, enter
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
at the command line. To integrate external hard drives automatically at boot time, you need to modify your /etc/fstab
file. To discover the device name the kernel allocates to a USB disk, you need to call dmesg | tail
once you have connected the drive with your Rasp Pi. For an external hard drive where your music collection is on the first (or only) partition, the device name is usually sdb1
. The corresponding entry for /etc/fstab
to mount the drive directly as the default MPD directory for music is shown in Listing 3.
Listing 3
Mount USB External Disk
# /etc/fstab /dev/sdb1 /var/lib/mpd/music auto defaults 0 0
Network Shares
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a mass storage system that serves up its internal disks on the network. A small NAS usually comprises one or two hard drives in a compact housing with its own power supply. Most NAS drives provide their data on the LAN as Windows shares. To address these shares on Linux, you will need to install the Samba client using:
sudo apt-get install samba-client
A Windows share usually requires a username and a password for access. To avoid having to enter the password in the fstab file, which is readable for everyone, create a file with the appropriate login credentials and preferably store it in the /root
directory. This file, which is usually named .smbcredentials
, looks like:
# /root/.smbcredentials username=<Username> password=<password>
Again, the share is integrated via the /etc/fstab
file. The corresponding entry for a Samba share named MUSIC
on the server at 192.168.2.2
is:
# /etc/fstab //192.168.2.2/MUSIC /var/lib/mpd/music cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset="utf8" 0 0
Optionally, you can set the character set to UTF-8, as I did here. A call to
sudo mount /var/lib/mpd/music
then mounts the directory without a reboot. Check the results, if necessary, by calling:
sudo mount -l -t cifs
You can then refresh the music database with MPC, the MPD client for the command line, by calling mpc update
.
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