Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Synology

Just set up Synology Audio Station for music playback at home. I originally thought about some more open solution, but this was the easiest choice which might still change. Main motivation was that I got really cheaply Synology Remote, what is wireless remote and USB sound card and I was too lazy to set it up with something else.

It works quite nicely but now I'd like to control it from my N950 phone. Synology provide app for iPhone and Android, but others are left in the dark (there is also no documentation about the protocol). The options for me are to write native client or emulate some well know protocol, where I could use existing clients.

Quick googling have shown me python-mpd-server, what looks exactly as half of program I need, so I would have to implement only bindings to (not documented) Audio Station protocol (there is open-syno, which seems to implement this protocol, so at least there will be some hints).

Having Synology diskstation, notebook with XBMC and smart phone with Symbian, it should be possible to make all these talk together being able to play music stored on the diskstation using XBMC and controlled by phone, right?

I tried to set it up some time ago, but I used samba export on the diskstatio and all I found for controlling was XBMC Symbian S60 Remote v2, which is indeed useful, but choosing what to play remotely is quite limited. Luckily yesterday I've discovered world of DLNA aka uPNP and was surprised that this works pretty well. I've configured diskstation to behave as a uPHP media server, XBMC is able to act as media renderer and my Nokia E52 has ability to act as a controller. If you are lost in these terms, good overview is available here.

Well the control interface of Nokia E52 is far from perfect, but still provides good way to control all the stuff. Maybe I will look for some other solution in future, I'm sure it will exist as well.