My Squeezebox servers have been down for a week because of this most recent problem and I get the very definite impression that no one really understands what's wrong (I certainly don't).
Perl is fine for its original purpose of running quickie, one-off scripts on text and system log files. That's how I use it. But I think it's simply the wrong platform for a large, complex and unique package like squeezeboxserver with many dependencies on a huge and only loosely standardized run-time environment that it does not and apparently cannot fully control. I understand that squeezeboxserver is an open source project that relies on volunteer contributions. That and its support for open audio formats like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis initially attracted me to it. But I've also dropped a fair chunk of change on Logitech's proprietary hardware players, and they're bricks without a working squeezeboxserver. I think Logitech owes its customers at least one working version of the server for each advertised platform that runs without constant attention from a local Perl hacker. Even when it does work, squeezeboxserver has always seemed much too slow for what it does. It seems to suffer from a serious case of feature bloat. All I've ever really wanted is a simple, fast and above all *reliable* way to play my large, multi-format music collection at home. Even a command-line interface would be enough. A barebones textual web interface would be a plus, along with the ability to stream a simple audio-over-HTTP feed. I certainly don't need RSS feeds scrolling across my player display, or dozens of other plugins and options of questionable utility. When I want to read the news I fire up Firefox on my laptop. It does a much better job. I really hate to say this but it's probably time to re-survey the network music player market for something that doesn't depend on unique client-server protocols, even when the server is open source. There's something to be said for widely implemented application protocols like HTTP even when they lack a feature you might think you could use someday. Sometimes all you really want is to play your music without first having to parse a Perl error traceback. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
