PC audio & music to Squeezebox without the hassle

I've wanted for a while to play music / all audio from my linux PC on my Squeezeboxes, with ease. I've tried in the past to do this with BPA's Squeezebox WaveInput plugin but this route isn't for the faint hearted. It also limits the audio source just to the Squeezebox Server local machine unless you are advanced. Here is a very simple method which allows you to stream from any linux PC on your network to your Squeezebox. It relies on Video Lan Client VLC, Pulseaudio and Alsa. Here's how...

Logitech Squeezebox Touch & Ubuntu 12.04 Set up

The Logitech Squeezebox Touch is an excellent, touch-screen, networked streaming network music player that features:
- a 11cm colour touch screen
- 24-bit DAC
- 802.11g Wi-Fi (WPA-2ES, WPA Personal and 64/128 bit WEP)
- 10/100Mbps Ethernet
- RCA Analgoue out
- Digital SP/DIF out
- Digital Coax out
- Supports MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, HE-AACv2, HD-AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, APE, MPC and WavPack (via transcoding).
Setting it up under Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't as simple as expected mainly since the wiki for Debian/Ubuntu seems to be out of date.
Here's how I got on...

Ubuntu: XBMC with AirPlay enabled

As of XBMC v11 (Eden), XBMC supports being an AirPlay target, allowing any device/platform that can run XBMC to receive AirPlay content from an iOS or iTunes source (as well as other 3rd party AirPlay sources for desktops and even Android).

Here's how...

uShare on Ubuntu (HP Microserver build)

 

As part of the HP Microserver build: seeking to enable media sharing/streaming across the networked devices on the local area network i.e. TV's, Xbox360, iPad, Apple TV and smart phones I installed uShare. uShare is a free UPnP Audio Visual & DLNA Media Server. It implements the server component that provides UPnP media devices with information on available multimedia files. uShare uses the built-in http server of libupnp to stream the files to clients. It does not act as an UPnP Media Adaptor and thus, can't transcode streams to fit the client requirements. Read on...