Let me add my voice to those noting the synch improvements in 7.0. I had been running SlimServer (since 5.4.1) on XP pro since I bought my first Squeezebox in late 2004. Some months back I decided to give Linux a shot on this dedicated server. All it does is run SlimServer (now SqueezeCenter) and SAMBA network shares (including about 5,300 FLAC tracks).
A few weeks ago I took the plunge and replaced SlimServer 6.5 with the SqueezeCenter 7.0 beta because of the reported improvements in keeping multiple players synched. The synchronized play improvements are impressive. I can play FLACs all day and the players stay synched. Rock solid. That didn't happen under 6.5, either under XP or Linux. However, synchronized play of internet radio sometimes seems worse than with 6.5. Initially, on a fresh reboot of the server, the players will stick together, usually for about half an hour. At some point one player (it seems to happen with one Squeezebox V1 more than others, but not always and unpredictably) winds up ahead of the other three players. At that point, it begins skipping ahead as if it thinks it's behind, trys to catch up, but is simply getting further and further ahead and out of synch. The other players seem to stay in synch pretty well but over time they will exhibit some skipping. Stopping the stream, turning some of the players off, and starting it up again on just a couple of players and the skipping usually stops and the remaining players stay happily synched. Here's the weird part. As I said above, 7.0 will keep all four players in perfect synch for hours at a time. But if I try to play synchronized FLACs off my local hard drive after the skipping internet streaming behavior described above, the FLACs are often out of synch and skip. That's irritating. So I wind up killing and restarting the SqueezeCenter or just rebooting the whole system and all's well. Simply turning all the players off then turning them all back on doesn't solve the problem. I've swapped some of the players around and it doesn't appear to be a problem with one specific Squeezebox, nor with a specific cable run. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd welcome them. I'd settle for writing a plugin to stop and restart the SqueezeCenter server or to reboot the system when I'm done listening to the radio, but I haven't been that industrious yet and it seems like a lot of work. The improvements to synched play from my local library are so significant that I'm willing to find a way to work around the strange behavior with streaming audio. Setup: SqueezeCenter Version: 7.0 - 16791 - Debian - EN - utf8 Server IP address: 192.168.0.4 Perl Version: 5.8.8 i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi MySQL Version: 5.0.45-Debian_1ubuntu3.1 I've increased the Synchronized Players Startup Delay from 100ms to 200ms; this had no noticable effect on playing FLACs, but streaming audio over the Internet is more likely to start our in synch. This is running on Ubuntu 7.10 server on an AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 160GB FD, 512MB RAM. Since all it runs is SAMBA and SqueezeCenter, I chose the Ubuntu server edition to minimize the overhead on the system: no GUI, and I dropped the system memory used by the video card from 128MB to 8MB. I manage the system via Telnet from behind my NAT box. Two Squeezebox V1s, two Squeezebox 3s, all hard wired. -- phill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ phill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15233 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38054 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/beta
