audio1;562564 Wrote: 
> Hello.  A technical question, please: can someone comment on the
> technical/practical differences between the "streaming" network audio
> model, as used by Squeezebox and many other commercial devices,
> compared to a conventional music playback application (such as
> XMMS/Rhythmbox/Amarok/Aqualung) which accesses music files over a
> network via NFS or SMB protocol?
> The latter seems more technically straightforward to me.
> Is the prevalence and popularity of streaming only because of the
> ability to have multiple clients, and multiple outputs?

Reading files via NFS/SMB and even UPNP type protocols does not give
you the indexing that a proper server would.  Ie, there is no NFS or
SMB API for "please show me all the tracks with genre 'Foo'".  Likewise
there is no API for  tracking playcounts, ratings, etc.

If you use simply one player, then I guess that doesn't matter: if the
player is sufficiently fat, it could make its own index by scanning
files. but if you have more than one player, why have more than one
index?  How would you synchronize ratings etc.

heck, if you only have one client, why even bother with NFS: just
attach the hard drive directly to the "player".  Adding NFS or SMB
seems to just complicate things more with a single player.


-- 
snarlydwarf
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