Well the only plus I am going to say here is the Squeezebox touch server (in the touch itself) indeed is a capable unix system and comes with many (if not all) standard unix features, although I think the credit goes to unix and open source communities, not logitech.
I have had frustrating experience with connecting SB touch to FAT32 external drives and would not detail it here. Since then I have reformatted the disk to ext3, broken all files into separate FLAC tracks without cue sheet. Now the drive is loaded with some 65,000 files including FLAC and cover arts and taking about 1 TB from a 1.5 TB ext partition. There is another separate 500 GB FAT partition. The first issue was SB touch automatically picks up the first partition on the disk, and that happened to be the empty FAT partition. I notice that after the software update I can now see two usb devices to choose from (Good!), but I managed to log into the SB touch via SSH and use fdisk that comes with it to relabel the partitions and that worked too! Now I can monitor the performance of SB touch from my computer (SSHed to SB touch). Apparently both drives were mounted automatically and successfully and I can browse them with no difficulty at all from the terminal. Starting the server and it looks for media files, it only took less than 1 hr to discover all files (very good!) and another couple of minutes to detect deleted files. But it crashed immediately when it tried to scan cover arts. That was supposedly going to take 8 hrs as it said. I tried again but failed at the same spot (1% or less). Throughtout the process I monitored the memory and cpu usage of different processes and "slimserver" and "jive" used most of the memory, although they did not use up all. After it crashed I could not browse the music folder and had to restart the SB server. Now this time it just halted there at the "scanning for medial files" stage without any success. But I can browse through music folder and play tracks. I was running short of time so only played one track (one movement from Mozart's concerto for flute and harp) and it was fine. The cover picture was shown well after around 10 seconds into music play. I have two questions: 1. How does album artwork scan work? Does it try to assign separate jpg files in each folder to separate tracks, or it searches for ID3 tags and cover arts embedded in each track? 2. If I got rid of all pictures, would that cure the problem? I liked the SB touch because of the sound quality and its features as a stand alone music player. I see no problem of not running the server or scanning the media files but simply browsing music folders to play tracks. I do not care whether I can browse by artists or album or search. In this case I think the slimserver script, or its subprocesses stalled in the second time when I attach the USB drive, but that saved the music performance. Someone said it's unjust to blame a $300 device for not working as we expect it to be. I never expect or want it to work like an IPod but can handle a large number of files in an external hard drive. If it could just serve as a standalone unix server that can read files from USB drives and play them with mplayer (again no credit to logitech) that's perfect. So my final question, is there any way, or any chance that we can disable the album scanning but simply play music tracks by browsing folders? For example, but revising the slimserver perl script, or by disable the database. There must be a way to do this. I have yet to spend more time looking at the log files and the script myself. Here are just summaries from my experiences yesterday. -- chzhzhang ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chzhzhang's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=38322 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=79943 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
