How to turn a single-board computer into a Squeezebox

Sun 16 Mar 2025

Lyrion music server is great, but if you want to have an always on player, the most obvious option would be to buy an old used Squeezebox, but they are sometimes hard to find, not to mention expensive. That's where various programs that can emulate the protocol and play the music on any computer come in.

Requirements

• Single board computer with some kind of audio output
• Lyrion music server already running

Note: This guide isn't specific to any one single board computer, it should work on pretty much any SBC you can get debian on (and probably armbian)

Note: I'm assuming you already have debian on your single board computer, if you don't go get it installed now, if you have a Raspberry Pi you'll want Raspberry Pi OS Lite, and anything else you probably want Armbian

Installing the packages

Run the following command to install the necessary packages

sudo apt install squeezelite pulseaudio pulsemixer

If you have an x86 SBC with weird audio hardware, you may need to install extra packages and perform extra configuration, however this isn't an issue for most ARM SBCs

If you are trying to get maximum audio quality and have installed extra audio hardware on your SBC (such as a Hat with a high-res DAC) you will want to not install pulseaudio and pulsemixer, and skip the next step. When you configure Squeezelite, don't add the second environment line. The use of pulseaudio is to work around issues with certain weird audio hardware and try to ensure this guide works for as many people as possible. Additionally, make sure to follow any setup instructions for the DAC itself, such as enabling things in boot.txt or installing extra packages.

Reconfiguring PulseAudio

Because we are going to use this as a single purpose appliance, it makes sense for PulseAudio to be running as a system service, instead of it's usual way of activation.

This assumes you are going to run Squeezelite as root, which is the default configuration but could introduce security issues.

Add root to the pulse-access group

sudo usermod -aG pulse-access root

Create /etc/systemd/system/pulseaudio.service with the following contents

[Unit]
Description=Sound Service
 
[Service]
# Note that notify will only work if --daemonize=no
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --exit-idle-time=-1 --disallow-exit=true --system --disallow-module-loading
Restart=always
 
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Then run

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

and

sudo systemctl enable --now pulseaudio

Configuring Squeezelite

Squeezelite is the program that emulates a squeezebox and actually plays the audio

Use sudo systemctl edit squeezelite.service to add overrides to the service file This should open the nano editor, underneath the first two lines of comments add this:

[Service]
Environment="SB_SERVER_IP=<your lyrion server ip>"
Environment="SB_EXTRA_ARGS=-a 44100"

And ensure to replace <your lyrion server ip> with the address of your lyrion server.

If you have multiple devices setup like this, and you experience conflicts between them, try manually specifying their MAC address by adding -m <MAC address> to the end of the second environment line, remembering to add a space before it.

I'll explain what these lines do now:

The second line tells Squeezelite the address of your Lyrion Music Server, so it's able to reach out to it The third line tells it to output at 44100khz, this fixes issues with Squeezelite and PulseAudio.

Enabling Squeezelite

Now all that's left to do is enable the client. Run the following commands

sudo systemctl enable squeezelite

And reboot the device with

sudo systemctl reboot

You should now see the device in Lyrion, and be able to play audio to it.

Troubleshooting

If you don't hear any audio try this: Run

sudo pulsemixer

And look to see if your audio device is present, if it is, good news! It's probably just muted. If the volume is zero, use the right arrow key to turn it up to 100% (the system audio device needs to be 100% so you can properly control it in Lyrion). If you still don't hear anything, look to see if the squares that make up the volume control are hollow or filled. If they are hollow, press m to unmute.

Acknowledgements

The systemd service for PulseAudio was taken from the excellent arch wiki

Tags:

• #linux
• #guide