Sigh. Just when I thought all was well, and I'd finally got MIP and SC to work together...
I haven't used MIP in earnest for a while; though I have been faithfully running and caching analysis as I add things to my library. Tonight, I suddenly had the notion to listen to one particular track, and I thought I'd generate a mix from it, to play whilst getting on with other things. So I found the song in the webiface, and hit the magic "M". Empty. Huh? Well, I'd seen this before: sometimes, for no good reason, I have to visit the MIP server web page before it will start generating mixes from SC. (This can be quite a pain, as I'm not always near a web browser when I have the notion of trying a mix.) So I did that, and tried again. Still Empty. I found the track in the Controller, and did press-Play to build a mix. Nothing happened (well, nothing mix-like anyway.) I tried generating a mix from another track in the same album. Empty. And another. And got a mix! Not one I wanted, but at least I got one. I did spot a message in the SC log saying that for one of the mixes, MIP had tried to load a non-existent song. Well, I'd just moved six albums by one artist from one drive to another, and by Murphy's Law, MIP chose one of those songs (rather than some 18,000 others). But that only appeared once, and I didn't see any other messages when I got more Empty mixes. I started the MIP GUI, found the track, and asked for a mix. And got one. Eventually, I remembered how to tell the GUI to send mixes to "SlimServer" rather than WMP (which I will not allow anywhere near my precious library, so I was horrified when it started up!) I'm sure I've had to tell MIP to do this several times now (they've obviously been taking a leaf out of Microsoft's book - the world experts at randomly resetting user configurations :-( ). So I finally got a mix using the track I wanted; but this is not how I want to have to do it normally. How come I can mix a track in the GUI (and no, it's not a recent track, and the analysis has been stored in its tags), but not from SqueezeCenter? Especially given that other tracks in the same album *can* be mixed from SC? Actually, I've just spotted that I *didn't* even get the whole mix! Less than 1/2 the tracks listed in MIP are in the playlist. (However, there seem to be some tracks left over from an earlier playlist - not the last things I was playing on this player (which was a sync'd playlist from another unit), but from the Dynamic playlist which was probably the last thing I started from this player. Hmmm. A clue?) Now, I can't be sure I've tried to build mixes since going from 7.1.x to 7.2.1, so this may have been introduced by the upgrade; but it might always have been there, and I just haven't had the misfortune to choose an "SC-unmixable" track before. I've read that some MIP funnies can be fixed by a complete rescan; but I'm sure I've done that already while trying to get the upgrade to work, and it takes bloody ages, so it's not going to happen while I'm actually trying to listen to my music, or use my desktop for other things. Yet again, I'm dismayed by the fragility of the MIP / SC connection. It took a lot of work to get it this far, and yet I still can't rely on it. Keeping MIP going is a lot of work - analyses of new music can take hours, and render my desktop useless for anything else while they're running. (I'm doing a lot of photo processing at the moment - indeed, I had sat down to do some more, but have now wasted the time looking into this instead.) I can think of a thousand things to try (apart from a rescan); but I've no idea which are more likely fixes, or might point the way to a fix, and I haven't the patience to try them all - or even any of them! Of course, having put lots of effort into getting MIP working, I don't feel like abandoning it, but it does feel like a gambler's trap. If I'd known at first how much effort it was going to be and how often it would let me down, I wouldn't have bothered. -- Brian -- Brian Ritchie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brian Ritchie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=54711 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
