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[Thief^]

I would blame your motherboard drivers (and maybe bios), I would recommend looking for updates.

This has nothing to do with that performance option mentioned by "weird", that only affects writing and you are having trouble reading the stick.

[wierd]

My bad, I thought he was copying TO it.  Not FROM it.

Is this an intel USB3 controller?  Some of those need the Renesas driver.

[Lord Shonus]

Not entirely a computer issue, but it is related.

I use my computer to listen to most of my audio -audiobooks and music mainly. I want to pipe that audio through three "dumb" stereo systems in addition to the direct-connected computer speakers, depending on where I am in the house (so the computer upstairs can play music in the kitchen downstairs, for example). The house in question doesn't really like WiFi signals between floors, as a point of reference.

I have thought of two possible methods, but both have problems. The first option would be to use those radio transmitters people use in their cars. The problem is that the range on these will either be too low or too big for my needs.

The second option would be to use some sort of bluetooth device. However, as mentioned the house does not like wireless signals.

I will be running a Cat-5 cable between floors due to the WiFi problem, is there a device I can network to that will broadcast the signal?

[wierd]

How tech savvy are you?

It sounds like what you (really) want are some dumb digital audio players that use a NAS for storage.

There are USB "soundcards" that can be plugged into things like old routers. (No, really.) You will need to have OpenWRT installed on them, but they can then be used for things like doing streaming music from internet radio and the like. See this project:

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=49013

I call them "soundcards", because that is what they really are-- but you will more commonly find them as "USB Headphones".  The magic lives in the dongle part. The headphones are just ordinary headphone speakers attached to the output wires.  You can cut the headphones off, and splice/solder on a line input plug, and then feed that into a stereo.

Something to consider if you have the needed skillset.

You wouldnt need to add any extra features to them, (keyboards, etc) if you just configured a static shoutcast service on your main computer, and gave it a static address in your private network. The devices would just be configured to look for that address, and retry connections endlessly until they connect, then just pipe the stream out onto the USB soundcard, and into your connected stereo. 

[Lord Shonus]

That would certainly work. I have a couple of DD-WRT routers lying around. The problem is that I like the existing stereo and speakers (particularly since I'll be hooking other things into the stereos). If I were going to go in that direction, it would be easier just get a couple of Raspberry Pi 3s running Android, network those to the storage device, and also run Pandora and Audible.

Come to think of it, that might be the best solution.

[wierd]

MPD looks like a good solution. It wouldnt have the streaming bandwidth consumption of the earlier idea. It would read the MP3 files directly from the NAS, and would be controlled through one of the many clients for it that are available.

Looks simpler to set up.



Here is the basic premise:

1) Reflash the DDWRT routers with OpenWRT.
2) Set up the needed USB stack support
3) Configure one of the /etc/init.d scripts to mount the NAS someplace in the filesystem
4) Attach a re-cabled USB Headset, or a USB soundcard with a patch cable to the line-input on your stereo
5) Install MPD on the router
6) Install the MPD client on whatever. (It has android flavors to control from a cellphone for cripes sake)

The reflashed openwrt routers will still be quite capable of being dumb hotspots downstairs. Dont worry about broadcasting into other rooms, just set the wifi antenna output power to something really low. Just enough that you can connect to it when in the room with it with your phone, or whatever.

That way when you want to listen to something over the stereo, just set it to "LINE", and tell the server to play something. Boom.

Nice tutorial
https://silkemeyer.net/wifihifi-how-to-run-music-player-daemon-on-an-openwrt-wifi-router

[Lord Shonus]

I see. From the other link you provided it looked like you had to use a modern stereo to connect to the router. As I said, I already have some old routers flashed with DD-WRT, so the up-front cost won't be too high. It would be worthwhile enough just for my existing media libraries, is it configurable for streaming services such as Audible as well?

[wierd]

Maybe.

It supports adding an http stream source to the playlist, but I don't know what kind of stream audible pushes.

I know things like iHeartRadio use a shoutcast flavor stream (I have set up several stations with pyradio that way. MPD should be able to play those just fine as well) I don't have a Pandora acct, so cannot comment there.

I will say that MPD supports shoutcast, vlc, and asx streams, which should cover most streaming services, as long as the stream address does not change constantly. Being able to tune into radio stations all over the country by playing iheart's shoutcast streams is pretty cool. I will check if Pandora does shoutcast real quick.

[wierd]

I don't know what Pandora uses, and have not seen anything on connecting to audible's streaming server either.

Dubious solution is to rip the .aax files from audible into mp3. There are many tools to do that out there, as many people want to listen to audio books on generic players.

I will look into connecting to an audible audio stream as a personal research project though.

[CABL]

Can someone recommend me a good headset? I need it for Duolingo voice exercises...

[Aklyon]

Can someone recommend me a good headset? I need it for Duolingo voice exercises...

Cheap or expensive?

[Reelya]

You need the Shure SE846 earbuds which retail here for the low low price of only $1189

~~~

BTW, I have a connection problem on my wifi router, it's a 3G or 4G connection ... basically HTTP is really quick and responsive by HTTPS just hangs or drops out. So google search hangs since it uses HTTPS, while Bing search gives me a near-instant result. Happens on both Firefox and Chrome, and on my laptop too, so it's the actual connection.

Is there something I could do proxy-wise or in my browser config to get around this.

[wierd]

HTTPS uses a different port number.  More than likely, your cellular carrier is prioritizing port 80, and throttling the shit out of everything else, and headplanting over the push industry is giving over migration to HTTPS.

You might see if you can use HTTPS over an HTTP proxy on port 80, and see if it circumvents the problem. Needs to be a tunneling proxy, most likely. HTTPS, by design, does not tolerate intermediaries.

[Reelya]

Thanks, that put me on the right track. The other thing that helped is that a few years ago, when I was a dirt poor student, I was connecting through an unsecured cafe's wifi, and back then they had software that would redirect you if you used too much port 80 traffic, so I redirected just HTTP traffic through a tunneling HTTPS proxy Google at the time was of course using port 80 HTTP.

This time it turned out that was the solution again, but to put all HTTPS traffic through a port 8080 tunnel. However the goal was again in order to use sites like Google, but this time on my paid connection (which is the shitty phone-based one, i'm still dirt poor without a proper connection)

[wierd]

Gotta love the silliness that carriers do to make it look like their service is "The fastest EVAR!", while also trying to keep only highly compressible, and bufferable data on the lines...


Encrypted data?! What's THAT!? you dont need that! It does not compress well, and makes our shit look bad!  We make our MONEY on oversubscription!! We throttle everything that cant rot in a big buffer someplace!!

Freaking asshats.


Seriously, just for fun, get a buffer bloat assessment on that line, and prepare to be amazed.