I've just finished getting MusicIP installed and running for the first time and integrated with Squeezebox. I must say I'm very happy with it. It's oddly satisfying to be able to push a button and automatically generate a playlist of songs, some of which I might have chosen and others of which I never would have (usually because I just wouldn't have thought of them), but all fitting together remarkably well.
In the process of getting MiP set up, I encountered a few bumps, some of which have not been remarked on in this forum in any thread I've seen, so I thought it would be worthwhile to contribute them here to the "forum documentation" for MiP and Squeezebox. Since this is really just a report of my own experience, I should say that it's Windows specific. I have a desktop PC running Windows 7 and an HP MediaSmart server running Windows Home Server (2007) where Logitech Media Server 7.7.1 is installed. The wide variation in people's experiences with MiP here may well have to do with their running different platforms, so beware that the generalizability of my report to your own case may depend on how similar your setup is to mine. For Windows users, cparker at http://www.spicefly.com/squeezeboxmip.html has provided detailed sets of step-by-step instructions for getting MiP installed and running. I found these guides to be very reliable. For Windows Home Server, use his instructions for Windows XP. The installation of MiP to WHS went without a hitch, except that the button pictures don't show up on the buttons on the button bar at the top of the MiP GUI. I don't know what accounts for this, but the labels are on the buttons and functionality seems unaffected. But don't install MiP on WHS first. It's best to go in the order cparker describes. I have particularly in mind installing MiP GUI on whatever machine you're going to use to analyze the files and getting the analysis done before doing anything else. Analysis will take a long time and is CPU intensive, so use the machine with the best CPU you've got. I used an Intel Core 2 Duo (E6550) running at 2.33 GHz, and it took 12 hours to analyze 200 GB of flac files. I expect the MediaSmart server (single core Celeron 440 at 2 GHz) would have taken at least twice as long. Of course, to copy that much data from one machine to another over 100 Mbit Ethernet takes over 5 hours! But in my case, I have a drive caddy I use to hot swap drives in and out of my server through its eSATA port, which cuts the transfer time in half. Anyway, for me the whole job was done in under 24 hours, including experiments and false starts. Three tips for doing the MiP file analysis: - First, do NOT install MiP Headless before analyzing your music files. I found that it strongly affects the time MiP takes to do the analysis. Without MiP Headless, the MiP GUI was analyzing files at a rate of about 13/minute. When I installed Headless, the rate dropped to about 1/minute. I uninstalled Headless, and the rate returned to what it had been before. (If you're not running the Squeezebox software on the machine where you do the analysis, there's really no need to ever install MiP Headless on that machine.) - Second, quite a few documents and discussions here speak of letting the MiP GUI analyze the music files and build a database, from which you can then have MiP write file specific analysis data into tags in the music files. Writing the analysis data into tags is a very good idea, but there's no need to wait until all the files are analyzed and then write the data to tags as a separate operation. In the MiP GUI Options (or "Preferences") screen, click "General," then check the box for "Archive analysis when tracks are analyzed (modifies files)." This will cause the tags to be written to each file as it is analyzed. - Third, note on the same Options|General screen the check box for "Preserve file modification time when updating tags." If this is not checked when the tags are written to the files, the file dates will be changed and your Squeezebox "New Music" will be lost. So if that's important to you, be sure to check the box. An issue with MusicIP is that it only recognizes ascii characters for file and path names, so there will be problems if you have folder or file names with characters like é, ñ, ö, etc. Oddly, MiP will analyze these files, store the analyses in tags, and allow these files to be scanned into Squeezebox Server. But you will (usually -- it varies) not be able to use them to create mixes, and in no case can they be included in MiP mixes. To allow them to be included, you may want to change their path/file names to remove the disallowed characters. I had hundreds of such files, but not thousands, and I judged it worthwhile to fix them. It took less than an hour. The hardest part -- for me -- was figuring out how to automate a process for finding them all. If you use MP3Tag, you can use my solution, which is posted here: http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=14976. If you have thousands of affected files, not hundreds, it might -- depending on your skills -- be worth figuring out how to automate fixing them, not just finding them. After all, the greater the percentage of your collection that can't be mixed, the less valuable MiP becomes. But I have no particular advice to offer as to how to do that (which says something about my own skills). There is no need to fix the names before running the analysis, since the bad names don't prevent MiP from analyzing the files and writing the analyses into tags. So you can fix the files at leisure afterwards and then refresh the MiP database. Speaking of refreshing the MiP database, another peculiarity of MiP is that the Headless system doesn't refresh its version of the MiP database when this is rebuilt using the GUI. That is, once you have MiP Headless running, you can delete the database file (default.m3lib), start the GUI, and compleltely rebuild the database, but Headless won't get the message until you click the "Refresh Songs" button in the Headless interface. (Stopping and restarting the Headlesss service would probably also do the trick, but I didn't test this.) And since it is the Headless system that communicates with Squeezebox, changes in the MiP database made with the GUI can't be scanned into Squeezebox until the Headless database is refreshed. One last item is that Squeezebox and MiP can't be integrated if you're using UNC names (\\server\share\rest_of_path_if_any) to point Squeezebox to your music collection. I'm not sure why this should be so. But I could not get MiP to use UNC names (even though you can use a UNC name to point MiP to your music collection) and the Logitech plugin for MiP doesn't make up the difference. So make sure you use drive letters to point Squeezebox to your music collection. It's really too bad the developers of MusicIP abandoned it and no one has carried on the project. The ability to create systems like this is a major benefit of computerizing your music, imo, and once in place, they are hugely enjoyable to play around with. Fortunately, at least in my case, getting MusicIP installed and integrated with Squeezebox was really not that much trouble, and I would encourage others whose situations are like mine to give it a try. -- dpotts ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dpotts's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=29782 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=92930
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