Translate

Friday, July 8, 2016

Squeezebox and VPN

With the VPN installed (My Little VPN) and few tweaks now I'm able to stream my music where ever I am from my Logitech Media server.

This article describes what I had to do on my Android phones to enable the remote streaming from my Logitech Squeezebox server.

On many Android phones I have, I used two apps to control the media server and stream music from it :

  • SqueezePlayer (not free)
    This is the player for the phone, the app that receive the stream from the server
  • Logitech Squeezebox Controller (free)
    This apps control the server, allow to choose the player and what to stream, radio, podcast or local music archive
These two apps works very well together and actually the SqueezePlayer links automatically with the controller.
However on newer versions of Android, the Logitech Squeezebox Controller is not working anymore.
That lead me to look for other applications to control the server, and I found two :
Squeezer works fine in the network but for strange reasons is not capable to work via the VPN leaving the Squeeze controller as only choice.
So, to recap, on older versions of android (up to 4.4.4) I use the apps:
On newer Android versions (5.0), I ended up to use:

Since my Logitech media player is totally behind firewall, i.e. there is not a public access (no open ports) it works only if the phone is connected to the local network.
With the VPN, without doing much effort, the applications recognize the server and allow the streaming without problems since the phone is actually IN the network.

On the VPN settings, I just enabled the Seamless tunnel and the ForcesAES-CBC option.
No specific settings for the Squeezebox apps.

Very nice to have everywhere your own music library.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

My little VPN

Having around a Raspberry Pi I decided to set up a VPN to access to my network and from there, to internet.
There are a lot of tutorials, guides, suggestions, so in the end I opted for Open VPN since is well supported for Android, my main remote access to my network.