My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

General discussion relating to the O2 Joggler, from the default O2 setup, to alternative operating systems and applications.
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

I have a load of Jogglers in the house, all running PNPIII and Squeezeplay gets a lot of use. They are all served by LMS running on a WHS 2011 Server. All good!

My daughter is off to Uni and I'd like her to be able to take her Joggler and music collection, but not have to take too much extra kit. Been reading thread after thread on NAS's that can run LMS, LMS running on the Joggler, mount points, etc. and my head is about to explode!

My Plan is to use a Joggler booting from a USB HDD with Squeezeplay OS and LMS running AND have all the music on the HDD as well.

So all that's needed is a Joggler (got) and 2.5" USB HDD (not got)

Would this work? Or if not, is there another 'simple' solution?
gegs
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Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2011 3:22 pm
Location: Edinburgh

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by gegs »

(I know that the suggestion below doesn't answer your question but it's worth knowing if your daughter is off to Uni)

If your daughter will have wi-fi, she could take out a Spotify Premium subscription and use Triode's Spotify plugin in Squeezeplay. This will also enable her to access the same music from her phone, iPod etc. and use offline playlists on her portable devices when she doesn't have wi-fi access.

Spotify Premium is also half-price for students if they have an NUS extra card; maybe only for a year, I'm not sure, but you can find out more at https://www.spotify.com/uk/student/nus/ ... esponsibly

My daughter is off to Malaysia on Thursday for a gap year before going to uni - she will be doing volunteer teaching with Project Trust. I've bought her a month of Premium to see if she is able to use it there. Spotify's T&Cs allow it but it's all dependent on how good her internet access will be. If all is OK, I'll renew her Premium account.

P.S. I don't work for Spotify (honest!) but I'm a big user of Triode's plugin on Squeezeplay and my kids love the offline playlist facility on their iPods.
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

Thanks gegs, that sounds like a good option if I can't get this plan working!

p.s. Sounds like a great gap year!
ilovemyjoggler
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Joined: Sun May 13, 2012 4:42 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by ilovemyjoggler »

It should work. I have my entire setup running off 2 usbs. One for sqpos and lms and the other housing a copy of my music.
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

Thanks ilovemyjoggler, that's great news...

I've got a few more questions:

1. I would really like to just have a single drive plugged in (and have the media on a separate partition) so she can put it on a laptop and copy new tracks onto it as and when necessary. I assume I'll need to mess around with gparted and create boot and media partitions? Is this easy?

2. Are there any idiot proof instructions anywhere on making a USB HDD bootable with Squeezeplay OS?

3. Do I need to buy a powered USB HDD, or does anyone know of any that will run powered directly from the USB port? Ideally 500GB->1TB.
gegs
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Location: Edinburgh

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by gegs »

Writing a disk image with Win32 Disk Imager will fail if you try to write straight to the hard drive, you need to fool the system.

First plug in a USB stick and start Win32 Disk Imager
Then select the image to write and choose the USB stick from the device drop down if it isn't there already (but don't write the image)
Now unplug the USB stick and plug in the USB hard drive
Write the image*

Win32 Disk Imager will write the image to the hard drive and the remaining space will be unformatted. You can boot to Gparted using the Live CD distro and resize the SqpOS partition (but don't touch the boot sector). You can format the remainder of the hard drive as FAT32**

If you've never used Gparted before, be careful; you can wipe your system without any "are you really, really sure" messages if you choose the wrong device. You shouldn't though, because the portable drive will have a conspicuously large amount of unformatted disk space (GParted gives a self-explanatory visual representation of each drive).

I've written BuZz's linux distros to portable hard drives before and used the data partition to store video files. It worked as a cheap NAS, streaming video to my Apple TV and my XBMC devices. Samsung portables worked for me without a powered hub and I even had a bluetooth mouse and USB powered speakers running from the Joggler at the same time (all through an unpowered hub). I bought a real NAS and no longer use the Joggler this way but it worked well.

*The only caveat is that the devices should be assigned the same drive letter. Usually this is the case but if, for example, your stick is identified as drive H but you've set the hard drive to be identified as drive Z, the swap trick will fail. You can easily reassign drive letters in Windows Disk Management (I'm still running XP so I can't say if it's the same with Win 7 or Win 8).

**I use FAT32 rather than NTFS (or another file system) because it is compatible with more computer systems.
johnkg
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Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

Brilliant, thanks gegs!

I'll check out Samsung drives, any other recommendations?
gegs
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Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2011 3:22 pm
Location: Edinburgh

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by gegs »

I forgot to mention that the USB hub also ran a small, student budget-friendly C-Media chip sound card.

The Samsung drive I used most recently was a 750 gig version of this one:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Slimlin ... B008PABFX8

The sound card I still use for my kitchen Joggler is one of these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/USB2-0-External ... 003ZM0XIY/
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

gegs wrote:
The Samsung drive I used most recently was a 750 gig version of this one:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Slimlin ... B008PABFX8
Ordered! Hopefully I'll be back in a couple of days to say it all worked swimmingly!
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

I'm back!

Disk formatted and music put onto an extra partition. SqueezeplayOS booted and configured.

How do I mount the music partition to /srv?
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

typing mount gives me

/dev/sda1 on /boot type vfat (rw)
/dev/sda2 on /media/usb0 type ext2 (rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sda1 on /media/usb1 type vfat (rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime)

so I assume its one of these.

I have created a media directory in /srv but any sudo mount command I type in returns
/srv/media is not block device
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

no progress, just more information:

sudo fdisk -l gives me

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 1028 MB, 1028128768 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 31376 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 64 * 512 = 32768 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/mmcblk0p1 * 1 1954 62520 ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 1955 9768 250048 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3 9769 17582 250048 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p4 17583 31376 441408 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000194400256 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 953859 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000dcfbc

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 31 31250 e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 32 953 944128 83 Linux
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 954 953857 975773696 7 HPFS/NTFS

so sda3 is where I want to be!
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

OK One last piece of info and I'll wait:

typing sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda3 /srv/media gave a nice long delay.

mount returns

/dev/sda1 on /boot type vfat (rw)
/dev/sda2 on /media/usb0 type ext2 (rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sda1 on /media/usb1 type vfat (rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime)
/dev/sda3 on /srv/media type ntfs (rw)

However I get

ls: cannot open directory media: Permission denied

when I try joggler@joggler:/srv$ ls media
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

but if I type sudo ls /srv/media/Music I can see my music!
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

OK Tenacity seems to be paying off.

mount -t ntfs /dev/sda3 /media/usb2 -o nls=utf8,umask=0222

I can do this and lms sees it as a mount point/scans/and music plays fine!

Can anyone help me with what the fstab entry would look like for this?
johnkg
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

Worked it out!

/dev/sda3 /media/usb2 ntfs nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0

All working!

Now on to play with Image Browser and Spotify...
gegs
Posts: 1146
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2011 3:22 pm
Location: Edinburgh

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by gegs »

Remember to use Triode's 3rd party Spotify addon. The official Spotify addon doesn't work with the Joggler.
EdT
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Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2012 9:25 am

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by EdT »

johnkg wrote: 1. I would really like to just have a single drive plugged in (and have the media on a separate partition) so she can put it on a laptop and copy new tracks onto it as and when necessary.
I do this. The only fly in the ointment is that you have to go through the hassle of getting LMS to search for the new tracks each time you add stuff. Otherwise it works fine.
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JimbobVFR400
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Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by JimbobVFR400 »

EdT wrote:
johnkg wrote: 1. I would really like to just have a single drive plugged in (and have the media on a separate partition) so she can put it on a laptop and copy new tracks onto it as and when necessary.
I do this. The only fly in the ointment is that you have to go through the hassle of getting LMS to search for the new tracks each time you add stuff. Otherwise it works fine.
That's the way LMS works although there is a slightly easier way of dealing with new music.

Using music folder to select any new music also initiates a scan of the folders you navigated to, so if you add a new album then selecting it via music folder will mean it's then added to the database, handy little trick if you just add a folder or two, although if you have added more than that then a new and changed scan is probably quicker and easier.
johnkg
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Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Re: My cunning plan with Squeezeplay OS

Post by johnkg »

Good to know this stuff.

I generally use 'Music Folder', so that's why it updates the library. Cheers!
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