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The question is: why? Why distribute the music that way, why not just attach it to a radio directly, or some RPi that will pull the stream, or just have it prerecorded. Despite its simplicity, seems to be overengineered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Metal detector ists ! Ah no, oops, you had it right, force of habit ;)
I'm not sure if the habit is because of the show or not, but I wanted to note for anyone who might be reading that "Detectorists" is a really charming British show that I highly recommend.
The question is: why? Why distribute the music that way, why not just attach it to a radio directly, or some RPi that will pull the stream, or just have it prerecorded. Despite its simplicity, seems to be overengineered.
Because distributing music over multicast works very well, and it's rather simple in nature: You get audio frames as UDP packets, you play them. Because it's multicast, they reach where they should.
> why not just attach it to a radio directly
Because you lose control of what's being played, and there are probably not many "elevator music" radio stations.
> or some RPi that will pull the stream
Because then every location that plays the music has to pull an individual stream, quickly saturating the bandwidth for no reason, instead of just subscribing to the multicast stream.
I also would not say "some RPi" is less engineering, and less maintenance, than the current solution that likely uses an off the shelf multicast audio system.
> or just have it prerecorded
Because you lose control of what's being played without a significant replacement step, when you could just play a multicast stream instead.
> Despite its simplicity, seems to be overengineered.
I'm honestly not convinced I read a less "overengineered" solution so far...
So either the elevator is on the same network, or they misconfigured the broadcast to all networks instead of the one needed. First one being much worse as it shows a failure to understand network segregation.
Yeah, with a better/better configured switch it could not reach the individual client unless it subscribed to the multicast stream, but again, who cares about that low bandwidth stream... you should not trust any hotel network anyway, those audio packets won't do extra harm.
The question is: why? Why distribute the music that way, why not just attach it to a radio directly, or some RPi that will pull the stream, or just have it prerecorded. Despite its simplicity, seems to be overengineered.
The advantage of IP distributed audio is that it functions over the existing IP network, so it avoids the need to wire a high-voltage audio system (which will still require multiple amplifiers in large buildings) or dedicated signal-level wiring to distributed amplifiers. It also tends to be more reliable as the IP network is more robust to issues like crosstalk and poor connections that can turn into frustrating troubleshooting on analog systems.
"Some RPi that pulls the stream" is exactly what this system is except it uses multicast for significantly reduced bandwidth usage and the receivers are presumably commercially-supported distributed audio equipment. No hotel wants to be doing patch management for embedded Linux devices.
> But what was this audio? Was this a sneakily placed bug that listened to me? [...] I can’t believe I spent time for this. It’s just elevator music. Joke's on you, it's a bug listening to you in your room while using steganography to merely appear to be elevator music!
> But what was this audio? Was this a sneakily placed bug that listened to me? [...] I can’t believe I spent time for this. It’s just elevator music. Joke's on you, it's a bug listening to you in your room while using steganography to merely appear to be elevator music!
okay this is way over my head - but this would have to be steganography hiding in the audio file that could only be run by someone like OP, detecting; downloading; etc the udp data, right?
To a casual observer snooping the relevant network, it would probably (as here) look as elevator music, but to the intended recipient who can decode the steganography, it would be a covert listening device.
The question is: why? Why distribute the music that way, why not just attach it to a radio directly, or some RPi that will pull the stream, or just have it prerecorded. Despite its simplicity, seems to be overengineered.