[bossanova808]

I'd run LMS on the msot powerful one - it's not really too heavy but with a large music library it's nice to have some grunt behind the server which does most of the work.

Re: the Pi - the addon includes the latest compiled arm/pi hard float binary I could find (& some very hacky platform detection logic) and should, in principle, work, but I haven't had a chance to test yet (I do have a pi but it's in a cupboard somewhere).

[dchurch24]

Thanks for the reply.

I'll try to find time to have a play with the Pi tonight and will let you know my progress.

The more powerful one, in my case, is the Windows 7 machine. Currently, I have it set up on an Acer Revo running Ubuntu. I will play around with it.

I can't wait to get this working - I'm having my 40th Birthday party in my house shortly - it'd be great to have the [same] music running over all three floors simultaneously!

....so, thank you very much for working on this! It's really appreciated!

[dchurch24]

Hi again.

I have this set up on two machines now, but I can't seem to get to the menu.

When I click the arrow keys (on either the Ubuntu version, or the Win7) nothing changes on the two green lines at the bottom so I can't get down to Synchronise.

Am I doing something wrong?

Just out of interest, is there a reason you didn't go with the xbmc skin menus for these options?

EDIT: After rebooting windows, the menu would change when using the arrow keys. Then they stopped again. Another reboot didn't fix it.

[bossanova808]

Ok, the reason the way it works as it does is that it's emulating a hardware player that had that exact two line display - it just embeds this display into the screen, and for people who use Squeezeboxes it's very familiar.

Now, if it's not reacting, that means that the LMS server is either not getting the messages, or not reacting to them (xbmc/xsqueeze is just a dumb player/screen in this context, with the server handling all control etc). Given it worked when you reboot the windows box (and you'd want to restart XSqueeze each time after doing that) - we know there's no config problem. Most likely the server was busy scanning your music library or something, and got upset maybe? You'd have to look at the LMS logs to see what was going on. Othjerwise it might be a network traffic issue - is your network all stable etc?

Note, you don't have to use the two line display to control things per se - you can select music by hitting 'i' (info) and starting the chooser...then when it is playing, your remote keys like play/stop/etc should all work pretty much as normal.

[dchurch24]

>> Ok, the reason the way it works as it does is that it's emulating a hardware player that had that exact two line display - it just embeds this display into the screen, and for people who use Squeezeboxes it's very familiar.

Ahh - I see! ;-)

I'll have another stab at it tonight when I get home. Thanks for the reply.

[bossanova808]

Just tried it on the Pi - using XBian 0.7 beta 1.

0.7.1 achieves fairly consistent playback at least - seems to maybe be some distortion though, but I am using tiny usb laptop speakers, hard to tell for sure - but fair to say the UI is crawling compared to other platforms..indeed you'd have to call it pretty non-reactive really.

Hopefully others will try Openelec or Raspbmc....

[dchurch24]

I'll try the OpenElec this coming weekend. Busy week this week, so sadly it's unlikely I'll be able to get to it before then.

Is there a way to get to the menu (rather than the song selection) via a keypress?

It's still not working, even after leaving it for hours - in case the server was busy. The LMS log returns very little that means anything to me.

Just: "Slim::Web::JSONRPC::requestMethod (443) request not dispatchable"

...but this is in the log before I press the keys on the remote client. Is there a way to sync without using the script, i.e. some third party software that I could use to test that it's working?

[bossanova808]

Yeah that JSON stuff is not related...at least, XSqueeze doesn't use JSON.

I am not sure what menu you mean? Player control is via the emdedded two line display, and music choosing is a separate plugin you launch with 'i'

Try running squeezeslave directly from the command line to see if you can get it working that way. See the squeezeslave wiki about that...Google will help you there. The actual playback stuff / networking stuff you need to solve at that basic level yourself, it's not really an XSqueeze thing, which is just wrapping the squeezeslave player (lives in addon/resources/bin/...etc). Once you have squeezeslave working from the command line, the rest will be easy. But generally it's all pretty easy, and the weird not responding thing I don't really get...

A debug log might help as well...

[dchurch24]

Hmmm...odd. Cheers for the reply, I'll get a debug log when I get back home.

I meant that is there another button press (instead of 'i') that might bring up the menu (like the music chooser plugin) that would enable me to bring up a menu that has the 'Settings/Synchronisation' stuff in it?

At the moment, I simply press the up/down/left/right buttons on the control (either on the USB remote, keyboard or Android remote) and nothing happens. I get the 'clicking' noise from XBMC, but the menu just sits there saying:

--------------
Squeezebox Home
Now Playing
--------------

in green lettering. This is on both Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7. I managed to get the Windows7 menu moving last night for a second, and this made me think that perhaps I'd inadvertantly pressed another key that enables the two line green menu thing, and then I managed to sync them - they were slightly out of sync but it was working fine. I went upstairs to where the Ubuntu one was to check the syncing, then came down and tried to move the menu again, but it had stopped responding to the arrow keys on any mechanism.

[bossanova808]

You can of course control the clients using the lms web interface or various iPhone / android apps as well as within XSqueeze. But I suspect you have a more fundamental issue to solve first...given neither of your clients seem to be connecting ok really.

[dchurch24]

Hi, yeah, I've been controlling the music from that interface - it seemingly plays on a machine randomly (and can continue a song from one machine to the next), but they're just not synchronised.

[bossanova808]

That really sounds like you didn't follow step 3 at the top of the thread - setting separate Mac addresses. Or failed to hit ok and actually save your settings....

[dchurch24]

You mean the bit that says "Local Player Mac"?

Odd. I'd set the mac address on the first one as xx:xx:xx:xx:xx.01 and xx:xx:xx:xx:xx.02 on the second.

I've just checked and they're still set to those addresses, but alas, I still can't control the menu

In the meantime, I've developed a C# front-end to control multiple xbmc boxes via the exposed http interface (with config for delay by ms, by machine so you can calibrate each box to start playing music at the exact same time), so am getting multiroom audio that way...but it would be nicer to be able to control it from within xbmc.

[bossanova808]

ok welll....debug log might help but hard to say...

[ktjensen]

seems to be working in stand alone single player mode. The controls are really primitive though.

1) Use the "I" button to bring up a list of songs? My suggestion is to somehow preload some music before starting. That way users do not get a blank screen.

2) The first time you play a song or full CD you get a blank screen. Again need to preload that CD. Have to exit out of SQUEEZE and restart to get a listing of the music.

3) Using the LEFT ARROW and the RIGHT ARROW and the UP and DOWN arrows to navigate the menu that controls the play is very primitive. There is no way to use my mouse or remote to do that?

4) On exit the whole XBMC is locked up. have to kill it.

but it is all functional. which says something