pedz;165505 Wrote: > Any help you can give in answering these questions would be greatly > appreciated. i am considering the squeezebox and roku and overall > prefer the squeezebox, but it all comes down to how well it supports > rhapsody. i have the following questions (i did a search but had > trouble finding the exact answers): >
Hi, Peter. I use Rhapsody extensively so I hope I can help. pedz;165505 Wrote: > > - from the squeezebox can i access my rhapsody library AND playlists? > My wife does not want to keep two libraries and sets of playlists. Yes, you CAN access your Rhapsody playlists. I should mention one caveat, though, and it's really more of a Rhapsody problem than a Slimserver problem: you may have noticed that Rhapsody sometimes removes tracks from its catalog (oftentimes they add them right back again, probably rearranging things in their database?). Well, this practice causes big problems with playlists since the playlists seem to point to specific tracks and if you have a playlist with lots of tracks that have been removed/moved then the SB will just throw an error and stop playing when it hits that track. You then have to hit skip a couple of times to get past the track. I've mainly noticed this on my massive holiday playlists that I've been playing lately. Seems like every 5th track or so has this issue. It's quite annoying when trying to use Rhapsody for background music to have it keep stopping. Don't know if Slimserver could be modified to try to jump to the next track when this happens, but that'd sure be nice... pedz;165505 Wrote: > > - my rhapsody library is a mixture of streamed music and ripped music, > will i be able to access both on the squeezebox through the rhapsody > server? again, don't want to use two separate servers, would make the > playlists useless (i don't mind if the rhapsody server chooses to > stream music i ripped, as long as it works.) Yes, this works. Truly anything that's in "My Library" in Rhapsody, along with your Rhapsody radio stations and playlists is available in slimserver. I should expound a bit on this, though. You mention the "Rhapsody server". Indeed, the Rhapsody application does run a UPnP server but, unlike the Roku, the Squeezebox does not talk to it directly. The Squeezebox ALWAYS talks to Slimserver, and Slimserver, in turn, talks to Rhapsody. Since you never "change servers" (as you must with the Roku) you always have access to your local music library and can actually create playlists in Slimserver that are a combination of tracks from your local Slimserver music library (even tracks that aren't in Rhapsody's "My Library") and music from Rhapsody. In short: if you have your local music library imported into Rhapsody you have 2 options of how to stream it at any given time: 1) Directly, through Slimserver's built-in music management and streaming capabilities (assuming you've pointed slimserver at the appropriate music directory), or 2) From your Rhapsody Library (but ultimately still, of course, through slimserver, as described above). "Switching" between the two shouldn't really be called switching, it's just a matter of choosing to browse either your Slimserver music catalog or your Rhapsody Library from the main Browse Music menu. I always use Slimserver's in-built management and streaming functionality for my local music because it's far more responsive and feature-laden than the Rhapsody UPnP interface. There are better search features and you have access to loads more information about your music (a major limitation of Slimserver's Rhapsody implementation is that once a track has been loaded to the Now Playing playlist you cannot view any track info besides the title of the track; no album or artist info is available). pedz;165505 Wrote: > > - i read some posts talking about not needing the rhapsody client > anymore, has that happened yet? And when it does will i still be able > to access my rhapsody library and playlists, including both streamed > and ripped music? > No, this has not happened yet. I have no idea as to the timeframe of a potential rollout nor what specific functionality might be planned for this. pedz;165505 Wrote: > > - is it possible to browse rhapsody beyond my library from the > squeezebox and get access to the full rhapsody collection? This isn't > a must have, but would be nice, accessing my own library is more > important. > Unfortunately, no. Strangely, the original third-party plugin (called Realslim) that added Rhapsody support to Slimserver 5.x several years back actually offered this functionality and I really loved it (in fact, I almost never used my Rhapsody library back then). The new "officially supported" Rhapsody support is really much more limited in comparison. That said, Realslim was a bit flaky and required some coercion to get setup the first time. pedz;165505 Wrote: > > - i saw a post about having to restart the squeezebox everytime > rhapsody is retarted, is that true, it would make it difficult? > Nope, not true. You can start and restart Rhapsody at will and Slimserver should just detect it's running and add Rhapsody as an option to the "Browse Music" list. Once or twice I've had it not recognize Rhapsody and shutting Rhapsody down and restarting it has seemed to fix it. pedz;165505 Wrote: > > > thanks for any help you can give, > peter Hope this has been helpful. I'd encourage you to download Slimserver for yourself. It's a free download and you can try everything out--including exploring Rhapsody. Slimserver even comes with a free software Squeezebox emulator called "softsqueeze" ( http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?SoftSqueeze ) which you can use to see exactly what it would be like to have a squeezebox accessing Rhapsody. -- azinck3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ azinck3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3967 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31047 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
