SqueezePlay OS for Joggler

[mashton]

I just wanted to say thanks to roobarb for this. It has restored harmony to my house in more ways than one. My previous setup, (which had been fine once upon a time...) running LMS on my NAS and squeezeplay on o2 software was a nightmare, with constant buffering and no bbc streams. My partner was not impressed.

I have just installed spOS on all three of my bottlers with LMS on one of them. Perfect, fast and, so far, stable.

Thank you.

[ilovemyjoggler]

Gegs. Thanks!!

[Glenn2]

Thanks roobarb (re standby clock) makes perfect sense when you put it like that.

I'm also a bit confused by what I should see when I press 'Internet Radio' on the main menu.
Sometimes I see BBC iPlayer (from triode's plugin) and nothing else, sometimes I also get the list of things like Staff Picks, Local, etc. and more importantly 'Search'. Most of the time these are missing though.

I wondered if it was a symptom of Squeezeplay starting before LMS is up. When you boot, Squeezeplay comes up first and notices when LMS comes up as it reorganises its menu, but the options I mentioned are still always missing. I can usually get them back by just choosing Quit-->Relaunch, which presumably restarts Squeezeplay but not LMS, but this doesn't always cure it. Sometimes I need another reboot and then another relaunch to get them back.

[gegs]

I'm between a rock and a hard place with sqpOS at the moment. I'd love it to be my main LMS setup and the addition of MPlayer and the ability to play Windows Media streams is a big plus...

...However, although I use internet radio a lot, my main use of Squeezeplay is Triode's Spotify plugin. When I first set up sqpOS and the Spotify plugin in LMS it works brilliantly, but when I go back to it after a while or after a reboot I get "Bad Player: (Error -5)" messages and nothing plays. When I test the plugin after a failure (there's a tool on the Spotify plugin page in LMS) it tells me that the Helper App isn't running. I don't know how to keep it running or to restart it - and it doesn't run after a reboot or relaunch. If restarting it involved running commands using SSH it wouldn't be suitable; my whole family use Spotify on the Joggler and the thought of explaining how to use PuTTY to kickstart their music is not a prospect I relish.

At present I have the choice of running LMS in PnPIII with Spotify and no WMA streams, or running sqpOS with WMA and no Spotify. As mentioned previously, Spotify is what I listen to most so it has to be the former for me.

It's not all bad news though because I only have problems with the server. I also have sqpOS running 'player only' on one of my Jogglers and it is rock solid.

[roobarb!]

It's not all bad news though because I only have problems with the server. I also have sqpOS running 'player only' on one of my Jogglers and it is rock solid.

The one that's running 'player only' - can that one connect to LMS running on the other Joggler and use Spotify properly? Also, if you relaunch SqueezePlay (Quit > Relaunch) on the one with the server, does Spotify start working?

[gegs]

It's not all bad news though because I only have problems with the server. I also have sqpOS running 'player only' on one of my Jogglers and it is rock solid.

The one that's running 'player only' - can that one connect to LMS running on the other Joggler and use Spotify properly? Also, if you relaunch SqueezePlay (Quit > Relaunch) on the one with the server, does Spotify start working?

If the sqpOS Joggler with LMS can't run the Spotify plugin, the 'player only' one also can't. They're both running from the same server/plugin architecture so if the server doesn't work properly, neither Joggler does. I meant that the 'player only' Joggler is rock solid in its capacity as a player, any shortcomings of the server will manifest themselves on the player. I can only run the Spotify plugin reliably using the PnPIII LMS at present.

I think I mentioned in my post that a relaunch or reboot of the sqpOS Joggler running LMS doesn't remedy things - i.e. the Spotify Helper App still doesn't run. I tried uninstalling the Spotify plugin and re-installing it, but then I was unable to activate it (i.e. I could tick the box to activate the plugin but it remained inactive after restarting the server).

[mashton]

Since upgrading I have a tiny bug witch 'similar artists' on the Spotify plugin. I can browse from the current playing track to similar artists, select and then see a list of albums for them. But, each of the albums has an empty track list. The upshot is that I can't easily add tracks to the current play list using similar artists. I used to do this a lot, as a kind of on the fly dj set.

I expect this problem is due to me now running LMS 7.7.2, the version that comes with spOS, rather than an issue with the squeezeplayer implementation, but it worked before upgrading so I'll post it in case.

Any ideas? Can anyone else recreate?

[mashton]

NB This works if I turn off last.fm for similar artists.

Hmm, maybe it never worked before and I had last.fm turned off.

[Fishy]

Hi - thanks to Roobarb! and gegs for recent advice on my Squeezeplay/Joggler journey!

Update -

Am now familiar with Putty and an old hand at setting the volume to 100% after a reboot.
This is adequate for the kitchen which uses a sub woofer 2.1 system and now sounds great.
However have ordered one of the cheapo USB sound cards recommended by gegs to experiment with as have 2 more Jogglers on the way for use with better equipment.
(@ilovemyjoggler - gegs was right, I was worried about long term effects on amps running at high level to compensate for low output from Joggler)

Haven't migrated LMS onto Joggler yet - still googling how to set up NFS share on my Lacie NAS
So LMS still running on the laptop.
Have switched to static IP's on everything squeezebox-related.
Was finding that Squeezebox Touch and Joggler kept "losing" the Library.
Also need NAS IP as part of the Joggler LMS script.
SB Touch was particularly tricky to re-attach - it's diagnostics showed it was looking for the laptop on a previous IP but there was no way to edit to the correct one.
In the end just changed the static address of the laptop to the one the Touch wanted
Think it all just shows it's better to have LMS on a Joggler, NAS or something else that is always up.
Also think static IP's are the best chance of everything still working after an unexpected power cut.
Incidentally has anyone looked at Sheevaplug/Raspberry Pi threads - intriguing what ??

http://squeezeplug.eu/wiki/index.php/Sq ... requisites and http://www.squeezeplug.eu/

Cheers all !

[wywywywy]

Hi. Is there a way to use static IP or is it definitely DHCP only? Thanks.

[Wilberforce]

Hi. Is there a way to use static IP or is it definitely DHCP only? Thanks.

You could manually configure your network in /etc/network/interfaces or If you want to be able to set it up in squeezeplay you could try my network applet.

[offbeatdave]

Hi. Is there a way to use static IP or is it definitely DHCP only? Thanks.

As noted a few pages back...

I have set the wireless IP address of my Squeezeplay OS Joggler manually (it survives a reboot) by Putty-ing in and typing

Code: Select all

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

and changing the contents of the file to

Code: Select all

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.2.97 <-- my chosen IP address
netmask 255.255.255.0 <-- all my usual network stuff
network 192.168.2.1 <-- my router's IP
broadcast 192.168.1.255 <-- not sure why, but it works for me!
gateway 192.168.2.1 <-- my router's IP
wpa-ssid "[pop your's in here!]"
wpa-psk "[pop your's in here!]]"

I saved and closed the file before restarting the network with

Code: Select all

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

This appears to hang but just exit the Putty window and then you will be able to Putty in with the new IP.

[wywywywy]

Nice! Thank you will try that out!

Would be lovely if Roobarb could integrate the applet in the distro in the future!!

[guidows]

roobarb!, I have a question: Why do you have Java installed in the SQP OS?, what is it function?

[roobarb!]

roobarb!, I have a question: Why do you have Java installed in the SQP OS?, what is it function?

I have no idea - to the best of my knowledge it shouldn't be doing anything. It's not installed by debootstrap, so it must have been a dependency of something.

[Glenn2]

Hi,
I've now switched the OS to the internal flash, and have SP and LMS all working fine and also serving my Squeezebox Classic on the hi-fi.
I have a USB-powered 2.5" HDD attached, with my FLAC library on it. Everything's working beautifully.
Is there something I can install on the Joggler so that I can see the HDD on my Windows 7 PC, and move new music to the HDD over the network?
Cheers!
Glenn

[guidows]

roobarb!, I have a question: Why do you have Java installed in the SQP OS?, what is it function?

I have no idea - to the best of my knowledge it shouldn't be doing anything. It's not installed by debootstrap, so it must have been a dependency of something.

Ok, good to know because all the java packages are some like 100mb.... and I did not see any dependency but
tzdata-java and ca-certificates-java.

At the end I removed java-common with all its dependences with no problems at this moment. It seem possible to remove other things, but only with the removing of java is possible to recover a good amount of space.

well, thanks again.

Guidows

(btrfs-tools dmidecode laptop-detect make nano xterm x11-utils xbitmaps zlibc libxft2 vainfo ca-certificates-java default-jre-headless icedtea-6-jre-cacao java-common libbluray-bdj openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib gnupg gnupg-curl ubuntu-keyring tzdata-java can be deleted with no effects),

[guidows]

Hi,
I've now switched the OS to the internal flash, and have SP and LMS all working fine and also serving my Squeezebox Classic on the hi-fi.
I have a USB-powered 2.5" HDD attached, with my FLAC library on it. Everything's working beautifully.
Is there something I can install on the Joggler so that I can see the HDD on my Windows 7 PC, and move new music to the HDD over the network?
Cheers!
Glenn

You can share folders using Samba. In the joggler, just install (using apt-get) the smbfs package.
To mount the shared folder in windows ( SMB/CIFS protocol) in the folder /mnt/win7 (previously created)

mount.cifs //SERVER_IP/FolderName /mnt/win7 -o pass=passwd_of_share_if_you_used_one

If you want to mount it automagicaly every boot, add a smb line in /etc/fstab (by example, my line in order to mount a timecapsule smb share)

//10.0.1.1/Data /mnt/capsule cifs password=time_capsule_passwd,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,rw,mand 0 0


Also you can share a joggler folder to access to it from windows.


At the end, try to investigate a little bit about "samba" at the web.

[Glenn2]

Ok thanks - I will.
Just to be clear, it is the HDD attached to the Joggler that I want to be able to share, so that I can see it from my Windows PC.
(I am not trying to see the HDD of the PC on the Joggler)

[guidows]

Pretty basic (and unsecured) samba configuration to share your disk.

edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and copy this:


[global]
workgroup = my_group
server string = joggler server
netbios name = joggler
security = share
local master = no
preferred master = no

[usbdisk]
comment = USB disk in joggler
path = /media/usb <==== Path of your usb mount point
public = yes
writable = yes
browseable = yes
guest ok = yes
force user = root <===== unsecured but...



then /etc/init.d/samba restart