Why? The use case of creating a MPRIS service is basically when you’re making a music player and want to broadcast metadata to the system. Since I was creating a webradio player in Go, I needed this feature. There are a lot of documentation online (and even lib) on how to create a MPRIS client to retrieve currently playing metadata but a lot less when it comes to creating an actual service.

Growing up as a kid I mostly listened music through my nice mp3 player: It created some kind a habit to store music locally and even after streaming platforms were widely used, having limited 3G on my smartphone I mostly relied on playing music stored locally. Over the years, my library grew quiet significantly and became harder and harder to organize. I could at any moment choose the easy pass to just throw everything away and switch everything to a streaming platform but I felt kind of nostalgic and as a tech enthusiast I couldn’t just rely on someone elses platform for my needs.

Having a bunch of unused 1 To HDD and my NAS getting full I decided to take extra steps ensuring my data were safe. Stuff I already had Custom NAS running Arch Linux (just an old PC) with 2*1 To HDD 2 unused 1 To HDD The idea Having 4 1 To HDD I could potentialy create a RAID 5 with 3 To of usable space ensuring my data were a little more safe.

Using 5.1 on Linux isn’t something very common in the first place. But using it over the S/PDIF (toslink) is even less common so finding documentation about how to do it is close to impossible. After hours and hours of struggling, I found a working solution so I decided to write an article about it. What is 5.1? The 5.1 technology allows audio to be sent to the speaker through 6 independant channels: left, right, center, rear left, rear right and the .