Cornrow

Cornrow is an audio sink daemon designed for low-powered boards like the Raspberry Pi. It accepts bluetooth audio sources and transforms your computer into a bluetooth speaker.

It is made for Debian based environments and compatible with Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic and Debian Stretch (and later). This means that this service runs as a dedicated user and can be cleanly installed and removed using Debian package management.

I am willing to provide an easy out-of-the-box solution for anyone. So, your experience with this little daemon is very appreciated. Please leave your comments and issues using it. Thanks a lot.

The daemon has a built-in equalizer which can be remote controlled via this app: corocomo

Installation (binary)

Compiled debian/ubuntu packages are available for armhf and amd64. Also a special version for Raspberry Pi exists rpi-armhf, which supports multichannel audio output via HDMI.

Get dependencies first

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ./cornrowd__<version>_<your_arch>.deb
sudo systemctl unmask cornrowd.service              # unmask service
sudo systemctl start cornrowd.service               # start-up service. You should now be able to connect any bluetooth audio device.
sudo systemctl enable cornrowd.service              # start-up service on each reboot.

Installation (from source)

Consider downloading the release tarballs. Master might be broken from time to time.

For Debian users

sudo apt install \
  debhelper libtool \
  cmake extra-cmake-modules \
  libasio-dev \
  libasound2-dev \
  libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev \
  libavcodec-dev \
  libavutil-dev \
  libboost-system-dev \
  libsbc-dev \
  qtconnectivity5-dev \
  libqt5websockets5-dev # get dependecies
wget https://github.com/mincequi/cornrow/releases/download/v0.7.0/cornrowd_0.7.0.tar.gz
tar xf cornrowd_0.7.0.tar.gz
cd cornrowd
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -nc                       # build unsigned debian package
cd ..
sudo apt install ./cornrowd_0.7.0_<your_arch>.deb  # install package
sudo systemctl unmask cornrowd.service              # unmask service
sudo systemctl start cornrowd.service               # start-up service. You should now be able to connect any bluetooth audio device.
sudo systemctl enable cornrowd.service              # start-up service on each reboot.

Arbitrary distro

Get the dependencies. Basically, these are ffmpeg (libav*), qt5bluetooth, qt5websockets

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mincequi/cornrow
cd cornrow
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Donations

Cornrow is free to use and developed during personal free time. If you like it and/or have a feature request, consider a donation. If you click on the button below, you will be taken to the secure PayPal Web site. You don't need to have a paypal account in order to make a donation.

Known issues

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B (BCM43143)

Firmware issues

Apparently, there are issues with on-board Bluetooth. Depending on the installed firmware i get stuttering Bluetooth audio playback. Additionally, there seem to be issues when operating in classic Bluetooth and Low Energy simultaneously. Here is an incomplete list of working/non-working firmware versions (https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-firmware/commits/master). Use the rpi-update to flash your Raspberry Pi to the according version:

sudo rpi-update <commit-id>

UART issues

A lot of Bluetooth packets seem to be dropped when CPU usage is low. As soon as the system is put under load, bluetooth packet reception is a lot better. This seems to be related to core frequency scaling (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/uart.md).

GCC-9

Currently, this does not compile with GCC9 and higher.