Streaming audio to an embedded Linux device

Question

A friend and I are tossing around some ideas for a project, which would be a music-activated RGB lights controller.  We have an ARM board with network connectivity, running Linux.  What we want to be able to do is to stream audio from a laptop/desktop computer to the device, for processing.  I'm not sure what software to use on the computer, for streaming, as well as client software on the embedded board.  Here are my primary constraints:
1) The streaming software has to run on at least Windows/Linux (although Mac would be a plus), and has to either be part of, or be pluggable into, a music app that's suitable for using playlists and managing large libraries (e.g. something like Songbird, rather than VLC).
2) The client software needs to have as little overhead as possible, due to the limitations of the embedded board, and it needs to be CLI
3) We really don't care about the quality of the audio, so long as the waveforms look enough like the originals that the lights can actually correspond to something meaningful in the audio
4) Service discovery would be a plus, as we'd eventually like to just plug in the controller and go, without having to mess with IP addresses and such
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

for a more generic approach -- since mpd requires you to put the media on the server and only plays certain defined filed types -- pulseaudio might be interesting, or even dlna/upnp? that last one for sure would be the most cross-platform solution. then each client could decide for itself which kind of audio to pass to the hub, be it mpd, radio, youtube etc.
interesing experiment you're doing here btw, i think more people will be interested in using a single small device that routes all their network audio to a stereo.
p.s., in case you want to stick to the classic mpd setup, there are windows clients available incluing a handy firefox plugin:
http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Windows_Compatibility
http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients