Like many I have been wondering what to do if my squeezebox devices fail. Many of the solutions on various threads suggest hardware replacements, and I'm a little puzzled as to why this is necessary at all.
LMS (with several plugins) is still far and away more flexible than anything else I have found for organising and selecting music. For instance, on no other system have I found a way to play a random Classical Work (i.e. a randomly selected series of sequential series of tracks on an album that makes up a classical work). The best non-LMS server I have found is MinimServer (a UpNP server that has a really clever way of selecting tracks and has many other good features), but it can't do the more sophisticated stuff. I can control what LMS is doing from a wireless device with a browser anywhere in the house. In my case I need a laptop or tablet since classical tracks tend to have long names that occupy too much space on a smartphone. I have good quality amplifiers connected to my wired home network. These are UPnP compliant, and will accept streaming across my home network. I have used foobar2000 (running under wine on linux) with a UPnP plugin that provides a 'playback stream capture' mode. This streams anything that foobar2000 is playing locally directly to my amplifiers over the network using lpcm at up to 24/192,000 quality - more than good enough for me. I therefore know that sending digital audio in this way is possible. So 'all I need' is something like the excellent squeezelite (which I use a lot when at my desktop PC), but instead of outputting to a local audio device, replicates what foobar can do using UPnP over my wired network. I don't mind that the amplifier won't display any information about what is currently playing, since I am usually the other side of the room and can't read it from there anyway. I use the browser for that. I really shouldn't need another hardware device, be it based on a Raspberry Pi or Wandboard, with the attendant complexities involved. I don't need another DAC, or discussions about async USB versus optical or coax, different linux kernels and so on, much fun though such ideas are. As a slightly playful experiment I did manage to get sound from squeezelite to my amplifiers over my wired network without using the Touch, utilising an over-complicated combination of tools pretending to be an internet radio, but I couldn't get better quality than mp3 to work, and I had too many bits of software in the chain to make it practical (squeezelite to high quality audio, monitored by vlc, streamed to a local http address, picked up via minimserver in a playlist and played by my renderer). Any attempt to stream wav (or flac) from vlc failed, and I'm guessing that is because I don't understand http streaming technology well enough. However, this really doesn't matter because this isn't a sensible solution, involving far too many intermediate steps. So, is there any chance that some clever developer could produce something like squeezelite (so I can continue to use LMS as the best-in-class server) but get it to stream over a network to a UPnP renderer at high (but selectable) quality, rather than outputting to a local audio device? Is the reason no such solution seems to exist is that there are technical downsides of which I am unaware? Or does someone out there know of an existing solution? Or am I just being daft.....? LMS 7.9 on VortexBox Midi running Xubuntu 14.04, FLACs 16->24 bit, 44.1->192kbps. Wired Touch + EDO, coax to Musical Fidelity M1 CLiC. Wireless Xubuntu 14.04 laptop controls LMS via Chromium. Meridian Explorer USB DAC to listen via Squeezelite on Vortexbox & other PCs as required. Spare Touch in loft. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PasTim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=41642 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101622 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
