WMA11B

WMA11B Without a TV

WMA11B is a device for downloading music from a server over 802.11b and play it. It has 802.11b, speaker and TV outputs, and it runs Linux.

WMAMP is replacement software for the WMA11B that can talk to Apple ITunes servers, including the free software ITunes server daapd.

I combined slimp3slave with code from wmamp and madplay to make it run with SlimServer. The mytinker yahoo group also has some binaries that do this better, including a version that supports stuff that plays on the TV. I’m mainly posting this because I think other people who want to hack on the wma11b will find it a useful development environment. Getting the build environment set up was the hardest part of the project. You can download it here. It includes the arm cross compilation tools, wmamp, slimp3slave, madplay, supporting libraries, wmaloader, and daapd. It also has a Makefile to build everything, from cross compiling all the libraries to rebuilding the cramfs images, to running all the components.

I run Debian GNU/Linux testing, but I think the build should work on other versions of GNU/Linux as well. To get started, download the tar.gz file and extract it. It will make a wma11b directory. First run “make setup-toolchain” in the wma11b/wmamp directory to unpack the cross compiler and stuff. The Makefile in that directory has targets to cross compile wmamp, slimp3slave, and all supporting libraries.

Once you’ve done the initial build, you can run “make build-image” to recreate the image. “make run-wmaloader” will run wmaloader on that image, and restarting the wma11b should cause it to download. When developing, I run “make rebuild-wmamp-slimp” to recompile slimp3slave and recreate the image.

The file is sort of an amalgamation from several wma11b projects. I started out hacking on wmamp to remove the TV code, but then discovered the slimp client. Slimserver seems awesome, but I couldn’t find source code for any of the clients so I just hacked slimp3slave myself to add remote control and a few other tweaks. If you want the slimp3slave image I’m using, you can grab it here, although it sounds like s3s has more features. This image has a hardcoded slimserver IP address and also enables telnet on the wma11b, so you’ll probably want to unzip the cramfs image and tweak that stuff.