Finding a good,
cheap sound card should have been as easy as ordering the one mentioned
on the mighty ohm for $10, but I thought I’d save eight bucks and order
the cheapest possible one on ebay. When it arrived, the right channel
was totally non-functional and to say the sound quality was poor would
be an understatement. It was impressive though, that anyone could
manufacture and deliver to my door a brand new USB sound card even
counting the defects for only two dollars. But that’s all beside the
point.
My second attempt was to borrow an M-Audio Podcast Factory from my boss. She had an extra one floating around and I thought it would make a great USB sound card since it had built in volume controls and RCA outputs. The sound quality overall was a big improvement over the ebay crap, but I started getting little pops during playback. I got the volume levels tuned to where I could bring that down to a minimum, but it was always noticably there. So I broke down and bought a new one for $10 on newegg.com. I got it in today and it works great!
I’m listening to some Ben Folds on this router now and the sound quality has gotten to the point where I can hear the defects in my 128kbps mp3 files, which is excellent because I’ve already started encoding my new music in FLAC. I also updated my display script a little. It’s better, but it tends to cause the audio to skip. I’ll put it here anyway for anyone who’s watching my progress:
echo currentsong \
| nc 127.0.0.1 6600 \
| grep -e '^Artist: ' -e '^Album: ' -e '^Title: ' \
| sed 's/^[A-Za-z:]*: \(.\{1,20\}\).*/\1?n/' > /dev/tts/0
This little router doesn’t really have any memory to spare so if anyone comes up with some memory saving tips on this bash hack or on openwrt/mpd in general, then drop me a line.