chris.mason;188028 Wrote: > Could you elaborate on why stream.mp3 is strange and/or horrible? I > steam internet radio (typically shoutcast and lastfm stuff), and my > music via mp3 to work. I usually throttle it to 160kb so as not to > affect my home upload bandwidth (other people at home use the PC ya > see), and it works fine for the most part. All my music is FLAC, btw. > > I have used SoftSqueeze, and it is a great way to listen to your FLAC > files, but thats not always a good idea when listening remotely! I've > also had various lock-ups with SQ, but then I'm running it on > Solaris..!
I'm surprised you haven't run into the awkwardness of stream.mp3. Perhaps some streaming clients work better than others. This is why I don't like it: 1) Setting bitrate limiting for the first time is a little strange. You have to connect to your server, then set limiting, but depending on how long it took you to do that you may have already buffered a fair amount of silence and it seems like I always have to disconnect then reconnect to the stream to get the lower bitrate. 2) The silence stream in older versions of slimserver was always delivered at some ridiculously high bitrate like 320kbps. This was awkward as you kept stopping and rebuffering silence and it would also starve your upload bandwidth of your home connection while you were trying to use the web interface to cue up your playlist. I think this has now been fixed. 3) By far the biggest problem is how far ahead the mp3 playback software buffers! I don't know if different playback clients might work better than others but what tends to happen is that, after just a few minutes of listening, I've buffered half my playlist. So if I try to interact with slimserver to control my playback in any way the effects of the inputs aren't heard for sometimes 10 minutes or more. So, changing tracks means (1) clicking the song I want to listen to in the playlist (2) disconnecting my mp3 client from the stream (3) reconnecting my mp3 client to the stream (and in the process I've missed the beginning of the song). Anyhow, this isn't meant to be a rant against the failures of stream.mp3 - most of these are intrinsic to the unidirectional nature of the stream and I like the fact that at least the option is there to use it. And none of this is a big deal because softsqueeze works nearly perfectly. I try to urge users towards softsqueeze as much as possible because I've seen too many new slimserver users who just casually wanted to try it out and end up disappointed merely due to the limitations of stream.mp3. -- azinck3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ azinck3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3967 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33543 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
