Any other Squeezebox fans out there?

[sim]

Hi all,

Not a tech question, I was just curious to find out if there are any fellow Logitech (nee Slim Devices (http://slimdevices.com/)) Squeezebox users out there, running Squeezecenter on FreeBSD?

I've been running mine 24/7 for a couple of years now, no probs (apart from self-induced ones ;)). I'm still in awe that a) a mainstream devices supports FreeBSD and b) the squeezecenter server is actually in ports. How awesome it that?

I know it is the intersection of two fairly limited niches, but is there anyone else out there? :)

/s

[dave]

I run Squeezecenter on FreeBSD, and use SMB automount to mount my iTunes library (which is on a separate Windows storage server). I would like to see a better front-end than softsqueeze for this server. Like a squeezebox for the computer but with better interface: visualizations, organizing and and tagging music, etc.

[sim]

Ooop, missed your reply :r

Glad to see I'm not entirely alone. I kind of do the opposite to you - My FreeBSD server runs SqueezeCenter but also hosts the library, which it makes available to my xp laptop via samba. Works great.

I wrote a crude cron bash script with the idea of maintaining downsampled mirrors of the main tune library, which is FLAC rips from CD. The idea was to always have compressed ogg or mp3 versions of the library, for use on portable players etc. The script needs some more work though.

I'm with you though, we could do with a better soft-player. For me it's fine using winamp but it's not as nice as having a proper 'SC-aware' player. I tried softsqueeze a while back but it just chewed up CPU :(, and I didn't feel that the excellent squeezebox UI was really appropriate for a desktop environment.

sim

[dave]

I wrote a crude cron bash script with the idea of maintaining downsampled mirrors of the main tune library

Ambitious! Let me know how it goes. I would be interested in seeing the script.

-Dave

[sim]

Yeah I'm going to re-write it, hopefully make it a bit smarter about deciding which files need re-encoding. Might get a chance to look into it over the xmas break and I'd be happy to post it up here.

/sim

[kymbo]

Whups - I've come in a tad late.

I've been running mine 24/7 for a couple of years now, no probs (apart from self-induced ones ;)).

Heh.. I hear you. I'm still a bit green with a lot of FreeBSD itself, despite having several machines chugging away quietly in the corner in various guises since 5.0.

I know it is the intersection of two fairly limited niches, but is there anyone else out there? :)

Yes indeedly. I irrepairably broke my Slimserver earlier in 2008 running 6.5.2(?) on FBSD 6.1 - for various reason decided to swap around hardware, causing various other of grief and have only now just about got what I think is now a stable platform running 7.1-RC2 and presently trying to get SC 7.2.1 to play ball.

Bout to to start another thread with some captures of my log messages...

Kym

[paean]

I've been running SlimServer 6.5.4 on FBSD 7.0 release for a while now. Its solid as a rock. I've been quite happy with it.
Having given FBSD a poor old 1GHz C7 processor, 384MB of RAM and a 10GB laptop drive, I didn't expect anything but hiccups. And it gets worse... my music collection is running off a USB1.1 port to an external drive!

In all honesty, its smooth. FLAC/MP3/OGG all play without any blips. Changing directories on my Squeezebox is faster coming from the FBSD box than from my XP box running an Athlon 1800+ with 512MB of RAM over a USB2 connection (using the same external drive).

I'm glad to have spotted this thread. I was a little amazed to find others cheerfully using FBSD for this use!

[neely615]

I run Squeezecenter on FreeBSD, and use SMB automount to mount my iTunes library (which is on a separate Windows storage server). I would like to see a better front-end than softsqueeze for this server. Like a squeezebox for the computer but with better interface: visualizations, organizing and and tagging music, etc.

well, i came across this while looking for other client programs to use squeezebox server, and came across this.

So, have you checked out Squeezeplay? Pretty nice front end; can be used as a remote client or simply to control another squeezebox.

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SqueezePlay

[dave]

neely615,

Squeezeplay is interesting, but not a user interface for a computer, really. It is just a hand-held user interface. I am looking for something that will allow me to organize play and visualize my music, like iTunes, but for the SqueezeCenter.

[dave]

UPDATE: I have moved my iTunes library to a FreeBSD samba file server, with a zfs raid array for storage. Squeezecenter accesses files locally, and I use SMB to connect from my iTunes client computers.

[neely615]

(Read the top of the page on that link about the nightly release to find info about the client.)

Squeezeplay has a pretty cool UI that works well on windows though I haven't gotten it to compile right on linux. Its based on Perl and Lua, and I dig it. Do all my server side stuff through a web browser, but for listening while I work I can use squeezeplay.

Good luck.

[sim]

Hmm, tempted to take a look at SqueezePlay - sounds interesting.

I've just upgraded my server to 8-RC1 and SqueezeBoxServer 7.4 (nee SqueezeCenter). Had some troubles which turned out to be due to a broken ports db causing some perl modules to go astray, but thankfully got it sorted and normal service has been resumed. SBS 7.4 feels snappier than previous versions I think, even on my underclocked Sempron (1300->1000MHz - no fan! :) )

Anyone tried the SqueezeBox client for the Android phones? Got it on my G1 - it's brilliant!

sim

[dave]

Thanks for update, sim. I am updating to squeezeboxserver (lot of name changes) 7.4.1 now. will post if any troubles arise.

[FerienBSD]

Hi Folks,

i'am a great fan of Sqeezebox and i run it since the classic came out from slimdevices.

now i running a bunch of Duet receivers and controllers and it works more or less.

what does that means? Most Controllers works fine, but after one or more hours of not touching it, you want to "wakem" up with a slight shake, it comes out with waiting connecting to the server... message which never disapear. there is no way to make it works but remove and reinsert the battery helps. this and many such bad effects i experienced in the past 10 month's.

i upgraded view versions of squeezecenter 7.xxx and each time it becames better and better. actually it is one

now i'am going to upgrade to Squeezeboxserver 7.4.1 but this is a pain in the ***.
on my old FBSD-7.0-RELEASE is nearly not possible to upgrade, after all portupgrades my Perls System messedup between 5.8.8 and 5.8.9 and and and...
then i decided to upgrade my FreeBSD from 7.0 to 8.0rc2 but fail, my old COMPAQ hardware is not supported enough. now i'am installing 7.2-RELEASE and it seems to be better. as soon as this version is installed i'll gonna try the Squeezeboxserver again.
i let you know....


btw.
and sorry abt my poor english..

marcel

[FerienBSD]

Hi Folks,

news update. i've instlled Squeezeboxserver 7.4.1 out of the portcollection on my FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE Server.

First i installed the FreeBSD over the net. Then i updated the port tree and all the ports on my server.

then i started the make on squeezeboxserver and answer tons of questions the install scrip popped up. after few hours of compiling and fetching i did the rest of userland and restart...

just mount the nfs imports and ... IT WORKS... tooks another 3 hours for indexing all my media files (~80GB of MP3 and so on)

All controllers found the firmware updates and the receivers too. after all upgrdings the system works stable and nice.

up to now, ha have experienced no more strage effects.

it seems to be stable now...

we will test it extensively as usual and i'll report here if anything is not working sexy...

marcel

[paean]

I'm now running my squeezebox server (7.4.1) on my FreeNAS box via the SlimNAS installer. Its an easy way to amalgamate your storage and music playing services.

I recommend looking into it (http://www.herger.net/slim/detail.php?nr=1026). ( =

[sim]

Great to see some other SB/FreeBSD users out there!

Ambitious! Let me know how it goes. I would be interested in seeing the script.
-Dave

Ok, it took me almost a year to get round to it, but in the end it only took an evening. If you're interested in the script I can post it up. It's nothing special, just some shell scripting (which could probably be done in smarter/cooler ways - my sh skills aren't brilliant!). It lets you set an ogg quality level, e.g. 5, and then it will replicate your flac library under .../ogg/q5/. In my case I maintain a q5 tree (for laptop use) and a q2 tree (for phone use). The script is just about smart enough to only generate modified files, so you can run it as a cron if you like.


Let me know if there's any interest in this and I'll post it. :)

Cheers

sim

[narcolepsy]

I just got a squeezebox radio after reading about all this here, and am happy to report its one of the best bits of electronics I've ever bought! Squeezecentre caused me a mild problem when i installed it first, but was just a ports niggle...a cvsup of ports and I was laughing. Now I get all my music+podcasts everywhere! Cheers guys!

I am interested in your script sim, is there any chance you could post it?

Cheers,

[sim]

I am interested in your script sim, is there any chance you could post it?
Cheers,

My script is attached, notes are at the top of the file. It works for me, but should not be considered production quality, so please review, backup and test first!!

Enjoy!

sim

[tingo]

Yesterday I bought myself a Squeezebox. My music library is on an old FreeBSD machine (FreeBSD 5.5-stable), but I took a chance and installed squeezecenter 7.0.1 (squeezecenter-7.0.1_4) from the ports tree on that machine (updated last year sometime). Compiling and installing everything took a few hours (the machine is only a PII @ 500 MHz, 320 MB RAM), but after that everything works. It found my squeezebox and updated the firmware on it, indexed my music library and is now playing. :-)

[sim]

Welcome to the club tingo!

Glad to hear you got everything running smoothly. Your machine is even lowlier than mine :D (Sempron 1300 underclocked to 1Ghz)

I have an SB Receiver in the post too, to complement my original SB3. Can't wait!

sim

[blink]

I'm using squeezebox on 8.0-STABLE amd64 against my zfs pool and it's been pretty much bulletproof. I only wonder about what would happen if the music collection was unavailable and my alarm is set to current playlist; haven't tested to see if it has a default it might switch to, but one hopes.

sim: I played with your script a bit and the result is here (http://pastebin.ca/1768424).

I've changed the manifest to store tab delimited information that you were hashing before. The reason is that I have filenames with colons in them and I'd rather have a human readable manifest. Also switched from sed sanitizing find output to PE in the variables.

I actually did all my testing with linux and bash up until I was about to submit it here, and realized that it's just /bin/sh; if there's a better way to load a tab into IFS, I don't know it (yet). Also, not sure if it's possible or how to grep -F with tabs in the string (I was able to do so in bash using the same $'\t' I used in echo statements) so I load it all into a variable before grep. ugly.

I'm going to do tag dumping next, simply because I wanted to get it working perfectly on both my fbsd box and gentoo/ubuntu.

Thanks for sharing your script, you saved me from starting from scratch, and I wasn't even toying with the idea of manifests so you saved me banging my head until I realized it.:beer

[dave]

I am also using squeezebox server on 8 (RELEASE). I am also using a zfs pool (raidz), but as I am on i386, I have had to do some tuning for stablility under situations of high disk usage such as library scans. See How to calculate for zfs tuning (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9143).

[sim]

haven't tested to see if it has a default it might switch to, but one hopes.


Ha, that's a new excuse for the boss...!


Thanks for sharing your script, you saved me from starting from scratch, and I wasn't even toying with the idea of manifests so you saved me banging my head until I realized it.:beer

No prob, glad it was useful - and thanks for your work too. The idea behind the manifests was to give good performance for detecting file changes without getting sucked into managing a full RDBMS solution. Quick and dirty, you might say, but it seems to work :)

[lou1z]

Hi,

New to FreeBSD. Did a minimal install and then a portsnap fetch extract to install squeezeboxserver. Have to say I'm slightly alarmed. It's taking over an hour now and seems to be compiling loads of programs etc. When I installed using Centos, Debian etc from rpm or apt, it never took this long. Is this normal?

[dave]

Yes, it is normal. You are installing from ports, so you are effectively building each application from source. This is the recommended way of installing applications on FreeBSD. When you run apt in CentOS, you are doing the equivalent of installing packages in FreeBSD. For more info on using ports vs packages in FreeBSD, see Installing Applications: Packages and Ports (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html). Later, when it comes time to maintain (update) your ports, you may wish to look at the port portmaster.

[sim]

Yep, like Dave says, a big difference between compiling from source code (ports) and installing pre-built binaries. Also you're running a minimal FreeBSD install, which means it will no doubt need to build a ton[ne] of other dependencies in order for the Squeezebox server to build.

sim

[lou1z]

Thanks for the reply, Dave & Sim. It wasn't so much the compiling etc, which I could understand. It was the amount of compiling it needed. Never ever known anything to take that long. It was like a new install. It also needed a fair amount of free space before it cleaned everything up.

[Zare]

Yes, due to licensing, squeezeboxserver's binary package isn't available. So you need to compile it via ports. Ports system is also compiling and installing all squeezeboxserver dependencies. You could do a binary install (via pkg_add) of those dependencies and just compile squeezeboxserver via ports, which would go down way faster, but it isn't recommended for a number of reasons.

[lou1z]

I couldn't get the lastest Squeezeboxserver-7.4 to install FreeBSD-8_x64 even though I compiled it from the latest ports updates etc.
For some reason, it didn't like mysql-5.5*. It complained about an unsupported locale setting which I then manually set to utf-8 but it still didn't sort the issue out.
Downgrading mysql to mysql-5.1.56 allowed squeezeboxserver to work although I suspect it may be something to do with perl also.

[c0redumpt]

Hi, I am quite new to FreeBSD and have managed to install squeezebox server 7.5.4. I've set up a simple zfs pool ("store") and have put some music on there. When I go to scan the music folder it doesn't pick up anything at all, and I'm at a loss to remedy this.

Any ideas/hints greatly appreciated. I dont think I've necessarily set up zfs entirely correctly as on bootup I get messages like cannot mount 'store' but when I log in, store is there, mounted with music detected.

Apologies as this may be two issues. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[blink]

c0redumpt: ensure you have the following in your /etc/rc.conf:

zfs_enable="YES"

[c0redumpt]

Thank you Blink, I have managed to enable ZFS and have solved all issues that relate to that.
However my problems with squeezebox server not scanning my music directory persists. I have read that squeezebox is very particular with which version of mysql you have running and that I may have to downgrade to the correct version.

But before I go to that trouble, was hoping that maybe someone on these forums had a simple fix?