The Rio (or Dell, or SonicBlue) Receiver

In 2001 or so, Rio brought out a stereo-component-shaped MP3 player based on the Empeg, designed to play audio from some machine elsewhere on your network. It was also sold under the SONIC|blue and Dell brand names. Its original price was a little high, but at today's eBay prices it's a reasonable and convenient way to play music. It's a fairly easily programmable little embedded box that just happens to run Linux and have an IR remote and the ability to drive a pair of loudpseakers.

It would be an exaggeration to say that there's a community of open-source coders improving on the original software, but a number of individuals have improved on various things before losing interest or being eaten by grues or whatever.

• Jeff Mock has information on building a Linux system to run on the Rio, including the toolchain and kernel patches. He also has a set of Perl scripts which replace the original (non-open-source) server-side software.
• The rioplay project on Sourceforge is a GPL'd replacement application to make the Rio act like a piece of stereo equipment using the original server, or Jeff Mock's replacement.
• Building the GNU toolchain to cross-compile for an ARM target from a non-ARM host.
• xplhal apparently includes a component to talk to the Rio Receiver hardware.
• Mike Winter has recently started another branch off the SF Rioplay project, MusicMuppet, which removes the need for the server CGI scripts (indexing is done by the player).

Replacement Rio server scripts

I've condensed Jeff Mock's scripts down into fewer (one to be called as a CGI, one to be run on the server to build an index, and an SSDP responder to be run from inetd). These scripts also allow the audio files to be located in arbitrary locations in the server's filesystem; I already had a collection of music I didn't want to rearrange, and building a tree of links seemed inelegant. In addition, they read the metadata from FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files.

• rioserve.wiml.release1.tar.gz, 6 kB

Improved Rio player application

The rioplay project on SourceForge hasn't seen much activity since 2002. To keep track of my own changes to the source code, I've set up a local Subversion repository. You can browse it via viewcvs. ViewCVS was too much trouble to maintain. I also plan to place tarballs here occasionally.

The last sourceforge version is 0.29alpha1, and so I have been naming my versions 0.29alpha1-eldritch-blah.

• Eldritch release 1: rioplay-eldritch-1.tar.bz2, 482656 bytes; 18^th December 2004.
• Eldritch release 2: rioplay-eldritch-2.tar.bz2 , 484517 bytes; and a compiled version, rioplay-eldritch-2-binary.tar.bz2, 457835 bytes; 30^th August 2005.

The binary tarfile should be unpacked in the root of your rioplay filesystem (in my case, /tftboot/rio). Right now it contains the binary in bin/, and a stub of an HTML tree for the web-based player UI I may write someday.

Thoughts for future development

• A web-based control interface. Release 2 has some initial work on this (no actual controllability though).
• DAAP support. There are a bunch of implementations of DAAP now for serving music to iTunes, so it seems like it'd be a nice replacement for the existing rio server protocol.
• Likewise, podcasts and whatnot.