azinck3;188035 Wrote: > 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.
Ah, I can see why you don't like it....! for 1), I've not really found that a problem. I set the bitrate limit, and reconnect my media player (I use XMMS). I've not noticed 2) to be a problem, perhaps I've lucky (I'm running SlimServer 6.5.2) I'm amazed about 3) - I've not come across this before. Typically XMMS buffers a few seconds, and thats it. When I make changes in the Slim UI, it therefore takes a few seconds for changes to become apparent. Not perfect but I don't mind. My feeling about streaming is that it is an entirely sub-optimal way of listening to my music, but as my normal mode is FLAC files streamed to my SB3 at home, and normally I wouldn't get to listen to my music at work, I'm OK with putting up with the inadequacies. Beats having to load up my 256k MP3 player! -- chris.mason ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chris.mason's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3323 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33543 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
