A few thoughts: I would have thought that mp3 would be of sufficient quality for an environment that I imagine would be far from an ideal listening environment - plus I'd hope that you'd have other things to concentrate on ;-)
Bearing in mind that the throughput on the wired connection is 100Mbps with full-duplex (so 100Mbs up AND downstream simultaneously), the bottle-neck will be at the server, rather than the SB3. Considering that FLAC transcoded to WAV was possible on the old SB1's 802.11b connection, that implies that 5Mbs is sufficient for this kind of signal, so 100Mbs for 20 wired SB3s might be pushing it. Someone with more knowledge of the bandwidth requirements for FLAC might have a better estimate there. Of course, you can always install a second NIC on a different subnet, and double your bandwidth. I think the Slimserver software will easily cope with 20 players, provided it has enough horsepower. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Hitchcock Sent: 08 December 2005 09:04 To: [email protected] Subject: [slim] Question on Server requirements I am a surgeon at a large medical clinic and am looking to create a central music system for our operating rooms. I am soliciting advice on what would be the optimum operating platform for a server to route music files to 10 to 20 rooms or more simultaneously. I have used FLAC files on my two wireless SB2 units at home with great success! I would assume that wired SB3 units would be optimal and cheaper for this type of project. Could a single Linux box serve FLAC files to 10 to 20 rooms simultaneously, or would another music file format be preferable for this application to lower bandwidth requirements? I would prefer to stick with FLAC files if possible for quality reasons, but I was not sure if a single computer could handle that many simultaneous FLAC requests. What specs would the server/network need to handle that many lines simultaneously? Can Slimserver make use of multiple processors in servers? Could there be any possibility of future expansion to add more rooms if necessary? Also wondering if Slimserver has any features to allow logins from individual rooms that would control access to portions of the music database. My thinking was that we would ideally only allow each room to access the portions of the music that someone working in the room actually owns. My assumption is that we would be technically breaking copyright rules to allow everyone unlimited access to the entire collective database. My plan was to allow surgeons or staff in the rooms to bring in CDs they own to be added to the server in different directories, and then allow customized playlists for individual surgeons or staff members that would access only their own music. One other problem is that surgeons and staff do not always work in the same room every day, so we would need a way of controlling access to their own music in various rooms with different SB3 units every day. Can this be done with the basic Slimserver setup or any available Plugins? I saw in the WIKI the reference to running multiple Slim Server instances, and this sounds like what I was thinking of. If this can only be done with Linux then that may determine the platform needs for the server. Is this type of capability ever going to be included in future versions of Slimserver? Have any others used Slimserver for bigger projects like this? Wondering what others' experiences have been and if anyone has any other suggestions for planning this project? -- Thomas Hitchcock ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thomas Hitchcock's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1759 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18903 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
