SqueezePlay for Joggler (Native, Ubuntu & SQPOS)

[multiplex]

Not having any Squeezebox hardware myself, this is something that I'll be leaving for others to work on.

Oh - I was toying with the idea of having a look at it myself - I use Squeezeplay purely as a controller, I'm not really bothered about it showing up as a player though, but if it adds to the community...

I was just thinking that if I did a good job of it (and presented it as a patch that can be easily applied in your make process), it might be worthy of inclusion.

[wiredcharlie]

Not having any Squeezebox hardware myself, this is something that I'll be leaving for others to work on.

Oh - I was toying with the idea of having a look at it myself - I use Squeezeplay purely as a controller, I'm not really bothered about it showing up as a player though, but if it adds to the community...

I was just thinking that if I did a good job of it (and presented it as a patch that can be easily applied in your make process), it might be worthy of inclusion.

That would be really nice if you could!

[roobarb!]

I was just thinking that if I did a good job of it (and presented it as a patch that can be easily applied in your make process), it might be worthy of inclusion.

That's no problem - if you get it working, please let me know!

[oggie]

I've recently installed the birdslikewires SqueezePlay software (Version 1.31 (7.7.1-9561)) on the Native Joggler OS. This is working superb, apart from one issue...

After turning off SqueezePlay (using the power button icon in the top-left) and leaving for an idle period (overnight) the next time I wake the joggler and select a radio station the playback stutters badly. Even exiting the Now Playing screen and selecting another radio station gives the same result. I need to quit SqueezePlay and re-select from the Joggler main menu to get the playback working correctly.

I use the Joggler primarily for the SqueezePlay functionality, so would ideally just leave that software running all the time. Is anyone else managing to do this? Are there any settings I'd need to change?

Thanks

[roobarb!]

After turning off SqueezePlay (using the power button icon in the top-left) and leaving for an idle period (overnight) the next time I wake the joggler and select a radio station the playback stutters badly. Even exiting the Now Playing screen and selecting another radio station gives the same result. I need to quit SqueezePlay and re-select from the Joggler main menu to get the playback working correctly.

Hmm. This is reminiscent of the old disappearing audio bug, but I've not experienced anything like this since Optik put that new asound.conf file together. Could you do a

Code: Select all

Cat /etc/asound.conf

and post the output? Just want to check that this is right first.

[oggie]

I've connected via SSH (using putty) and the following was output:

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-sh: Cat: not found

[BuZz]

lowercase "cat"

[oggie]

Sorry, new to linux!

Ok, the output is:

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pcm.!default {
type plug;
slave.pcm "dmix0";
}

ctl.!default {
type hw;
card 0;
}
pcm.dsp0 {
type plug;
slave.pcm "dmix0";
}
ctl.dsp0 {
type hw;
card 0;
}
ctl.mixer0 {
type hw;
card 0;
}
pcm.dmix0 {
type dmix;
ipc_key 13759;

slave.pcm "hw:0,0";
slave.channels 2;

slave.rate 48000;
slave.period_size 4096;
slave.buffer_size 16384;

slave.period_time 84000;
slave.buffer_time 340000;

bindings.0 0;
bindings.1 1;
}

[roobarb!]

Sorry, new to linux!

My fault - capitalisation thing getting in the way from this iPad!

Right, well, that looks okay. I'm away from the Jogglers at the moment, so I can't test anything, I'm afraid. My best advice at the moment would be to try the simplified asound.conf from earlier in this thread. Off the top of my head it's something like:

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pcm.!default{
type: hw
card: 0}

ctl.!default{
type: hw
card: 0}

You use 'vi /etc/asound.conf' to edit the file, but I'll have to leave it up to you from there - I cant stand to type an explanation on how to use it on this on-screen keyboard!

[oggie]

Many thanks roobarb, I've modified the asound.conf file on both of my Jogglers, and they've both ran for 2 days flawlessly.

Will this file be overwritten when I next update SqueezePlay?

[roobarb!]

Will this file be overwritten when I next update SqueezePlay?

If the backup file is there, I don't think it will be changed, iirc. Don't quote me on that though, I can't really remember!

[squiggs1982]

Hi all

New to the site, so please be gentle!

First of all, fantastic site and some fantastic feats along with it! My thanks in advance (although hopefully not for the last time!) for the knowledge transfer and tools.

I bought a Joggler when they were on sale for £50 last time round, but to be honest, didn't really get a chance to get into it. Having recently moved house, I came across it again and thought I might have a nosey at what could be done properly. Imagine my delight when I realised SqueezPlay was available!

I've successfully installed Squeezeplay to the Joggler (natively) and it works generally, but not with things like Spotify or BBC Player. The message I get is "Problem: Unable to play file type for: xxx", where 'xxx' is the track or stream name.

Apologies if this has already been covered, but I couldn't find anything specific here. I did find on another forum that SqueezePlay doesn't have necessary codec support for anything but a very basic set of formats and I'm surmising that whatever these streams are, they aren't supported? Both Spotify and BBC work fine on my SqueezeBox radio.

Any thoughts?

Cheers!
Squiggs

[Jarv_77]

Hi,

There is a 'chown' command, much talked about on the forum which has helped sort this in the past for some...
See here. http://www.jogglerwiki.com/forum/viewto ... art=10#p71

I'm not the expert on how or why it works though..

Good luck!

David

[ajc5000]

Hi,

I'm loving SqueezePlay for the Native UI (I have three O2 Jogglers all running it around the house), but I'm having a few issues, and I wonder if anyone can help?

1) All of the devices appear to crash the UI occasionally. The music is still playing in the background and pressing the SqueezePlay icon on the Joggler menu once does nothing. Pressing it again (sometimes needing two or three presses more) will eventually bring up the splash screen. I'm using the Image Viewer screen saver, pulling a dynamically generated picture from the same server as the SqueezeBox server. I don't know whether this is causing this... but if there's something I can do to turn on logging in a method that can help diagnose what's causing the crash, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

I have the same probelm on all 4 of my jogglers. I keep them running 24/7 so I tend to see one or two of them do this at least once a week. I use 3 of them as remotes (no audio out) to my server running SqueezeSlave, however I also have one in my workshop running audio directly out of the Joggler.

I have looked into this further and can confirm that it's not a crash of the UI. SqueezePlay is running correctly. You can control it from another player, SBS still sees the player as active, and audio is still coming out of the Joggler in the workshop.

The problem is caused by the home screen application (opphone.swf) restarting. When this happens it runs on top of the SqueezePlay application so it looks like the SqueezePlay GUI has crashed. If you use PS and kill the opphone.swf process you can see SqueezePlay running under it. The opphone.swf application is restarted after a few seconds which then opens again on top of SqueezePlay.

When you press the SqueezePlay icon on the home page, the first push kills the original process. A second push then re-launch the application. You actually only need to press the SqueezePlay icon twice to re-launch the application. I too thought it was odd that sometimes it needed more than 2 pushes. I think this is down to the speed at which you press the button. The OS is still killing the original process so does not respond to subsequent pushes until the process has stopped.

If you can stop the opphone.swf application resetting it will fix the problem.

Regards,

Adam

[ordessa]

Squeeze play BBC channels

Loving the Squeezeplay option for months now... - however just recently I've explored a bit more...and found BBC as one of the streams.
Oh joy I thought... BBCR4 Extra as I cook.

but all the BBC radio channels dont work - I get "unable to play stream " or similar..
Is this a "known" or do I have an issue?

Steve

[Street]

I have the same probelm on all 4 of my jogglers. I keep them running 24/7 so I tend to see one or two of them do this at least once a week. I use 3 of them as remotes (no audio out) to my server running SqueezeSlave, however I also have one in my workshop running audio directly out of the Joggler.

I have looked into this further and can confirm that it's not a crash of the UI. SqueezePlay is running correctly. You can control it from another player, SBS still sees the player as active, and audio is still coming out of the Joggler in the workshop.

The problem is caused by the home screen application (opphone.swf) restarting. When this happens it runs on top of the SqueezePlay application so it looks like the SqueezePlay GUI has crashed. If you use PS and kill the opphone.swf process you can see SqueezePlay running under it. The opphone.swf application is restarted after a few seconds which then opens again on top of SqueezePlay.

When you press the SqueezePlay icon on the home page, the first push kills the original process. A second push then re-launch the application. You actually only need to press the SqueezePlay icon twice to re-launch the application. I too thought it was odd that sometimes it needed more than 2 pushes. I think this is down to the speed at which you press the button. The OS is still killing the original process so does not respond to subsequent pushes until the process has stopped.

If you can stop the opphone.swf application resetting it will fix the problem.

Regards,

Adam

Thats the one problem I have with all of my Jogglers now, everything else works perfectly! Don't suppose anyone has any ideas on how to stop that app resetting do they?

Could I just remove it without any problems? I don't use my Jogglers for anything else apart from SqueezePlay!

[florca]

Could I just remove it without any problems? I don't use my Jogglers for anything else apart from SqueezePlay!

This is very much "at your own risk" but I autostart Squeezeplay through a mod to the end of /openpeak/tango/run so that the original GUI never runs at all. Squeezeplay will restart on a "quit".

simply replace the x startup at the end of the file as below:

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while true ; do
#   xinit /openpeak/tango/xinit.sh -- -br
    xinit /media/squeezeplay/bin/squeezeplay.sh -- -br
done

This approach came from an old posting in the comments on roobarb's website and works well for me. Like you my joggler is only ever used as a Squeezebox

NB - I'm running a very old version of Squeezeplay (stable for me so I don't mess with it!) and I think the location of the startup script may have changed in later releases?

Good luck

Phil

[Street]

Ah, I had my SqueezePlay auto starting a different way after the original GUI starts up.

I've swapped it over to your way to see how it goes.

The path was quite similar, just needed to be /media/opt/squeezeplay..

I'll give it a go this week and see if it sorts the problem!

I did have the same problem with stuttering audio after I did the latest update that oggie had. It happened with all my Jogglers after I'd left them idle over night. I had to put the simple asound.conf back in too.

[mrw]

This is very much "at your own risk" but I autostart Squeezeplay through a mod to the end of /openpeak/tango/run so that the original GUI never runs at all. Squeezeplay will restart on a "quit".

I found that my soundcard didn't turn itself on in this circumstance, and the Joggler was uncannily silent. I don't know why.

I haven't verified that this is still the case, as I am currently launching from the native UI screen.

But I did add a specific 'turn on sound card' snippet to the squeezeplay.sh start up script, immediately before launching jive. This seemed to cure the problem, and may be worth trying should anyone else experience the same issue. From memory, it would have been something like this:

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...
# Coerce my soundcard into turning itself on
amixer sset Master on >/dev/nul
./jive

Update

At the risk of going off topic, I discover that a stock joggler boot script does attempt to turn the sound card on. However it looks for a control named 'Speaker' and fails on both of my Jogglers (O2 & OpenPeak models), because they do not have a 'Speaker' control. But they do have a 'Master' control which would seem to fulfill the same purpose.

Evidence of failure can be seen in a log file:

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# cat /openpeak/tango/amixer.out
Frame-1
amixer: Unable to find simple control 'Speaker',0

The relevant boot up script is: /etc/init.d/boot.d/S07boot.loadmodules, and the code is found in function check_snd.

By replacing the two occurrences of 'Speaker' with 'Master' in that function, I find that intended behaviour is restored, and the sound card is turned on. The ++ Recovered ++ snippet indicates that the script turned the sound card on:

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# cat /openpeak/tango/amixer.out
Frame-1
  Front Left: Playback 31 [124%] [0.00dB] [off]
  Front Right: Playback 31 [124%] [0.00dB] [off]
Error: Muted Audio!
++ Recovered ++

The start up command in the boot script differs from that which I gave above, but the behaviour appears to be the same. I'm a tiro when it comes to Linux and sound, and I don't know whether there is any real significance between the two forms of the command. But it might be better to use the boot script version, in which case one inserts the following snippet into the squeezeplay.sh script:

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...
# Coerce my soundcard into turning itself on
amixer -q -c 0 sset 'Master',0 unmute
./jive

[mrw]

Squeeze play BBC channels

Loving the Squeezeplay option for months now... - however just recently I've explored a bit more...and found BBC as one of the streams.
Oh joy I thought... BBCR4 Extra as I cook.

but all the BBC radio channels dont work - I get "unable to play stream " or similar..
Is this a "known" or do I have an issue?

Steve

That somewhat depends. As I understand it, BBC streams are typically either AAC or WMA format, and Squeezeplay on the Joggler will not render these - the necessary decoders are not included in Squeezeplay. So perhaps you simply have a "known".

If you have Logitech Media Server (formerly Squeezebox Server) running on your network somewhere, it will fetch the stream on behalf of the Joggler and transcode it into a format that Squeezeplay on Joggler can decode. Job then done.
I'm assuming that you don't already have a server running.

I believe that it may be possible to put the Server plus its transcoders onto the Joggler itself. I don't know how easy that is, but I bet someone on these forums does.