SqueezePlay OS for Joggler

[roobarb!]

Hi, firstly thanks to all for a brilliant piece of software! I have one question...I currently have my joggler streaming wirelessly from my PC upstairs, everything working fine. What I am trying to do is get the joggler to stream music from my htpc which has the Openelec version of xbmc running on it. The htpc is visible when I press the upnp button on the joggler, and it brings up all the music up, so there is a share of some description enabled. I can then play the relevant video or music file, while this is great, i wouldn't be a joggler nut if i didn't try and replicate this share directly through squeeze on the joggler?

So OpenElec is serving out your media and you want that media to appear in SqueezePlay? You would need to make a share on OpenElec (never used it, so I don't know how this would be done) and then point Logitech Media Server, that I assume is running on your PC, at that share and get it to scan it. Then LMS will make that content available to SqueezePlay on the Joggler.

You mention 'the UPnP button'. I'm guessing you're not running SqueezePlay OS?

[roobarb!]

I'm afraid that adding an additional on-screen keyboard won't be possible. There's not a proper window manager as such - SqueezePlay is rendered straight to the screen, so there's nothing there to control the appearance and positioning of other elements.

Thanks roobarb - I thought that might be the case. It would have been an 'orrible 'ack too - really this buttons thing needs to be tackled in SqueezePlay itself.

I was thinking about the uses for Joggler as Squeezebox - there are two quite separate ones:
* as a standalone music player, i.e. like the Squeezebox Radio but with a touch screen (ideal for a bathroom)
* as a music source to a hi-fi, i.e. like the Squeezebox Touch.
For each of these cases the SqueezePlay requirements are subtley different. The standalone player needs more on-screen buttons to make up for the convenient hard buttons on the SB Radio/Boom etc. The music source player probably doesn't need the volume control as you'll quite likely run a USB DAC and control volume on the amp.

I'll hop over the the SB forums and see what SqueezePlay customisation can be done...

What are the hard buttons on the Squeezebox Touch? I've never owned one, so don't know what I'm missing!

[roobarb!]

I do find the USB handy though for charging various devices including my phone, kindle etc, unfortunately the kindle wont let me continue to use it when it gets mounted as a drive.

Is there an easy way to disable automounting when you plug in devices like this, and preferably a simple way of reenabling it, failing that is there an easy way of un-mounting, possibly with the
Squeezeplay UI or less conveniently with the command line?

There's not a way of doing that in the UI, as it's a bit of a unique situation. You could uninstall usbmount with:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get remove usbmount

Of course, that removes auto-mounting entirely. Alternatively, you could have a search online and see if the kindle will charge regardless of the two data connections on the USB cable. The outer two pins on a USB plug are ground and +5V, which give you the current for charging, while the inner two are data. If you removed those two inner data pins on a cable, you could potentially make a 'charge only' cable. However, this doesn't work for every device; Apple devices use feedback over the data pins to determine the current to pull from a USB socket, so if they're missing it won't charge at all.

[JimbobVFR400]

Cheers for that, I might give it a go. although the main thing is my phone charges fine so may not.

On another note I've just added an optical output to my joggler as per the Wiki, took me a while to figure it out as I edited asound.conf but it wasn't working. I eventually had a look in alsamixer and found the S/PDIF was muted, pressing m to unmute sorted it out and my Joggler is now streaming a digital signal to the DAC in my Arcam amp.

Edit: The options to swap between internal and external soundcards: What exactly does it do. I imagine 2 copies of asound.conf and the button simply copies them. If this is the case could I edit the external file to work for my S/PDIF output. That way the built in option will allow me to switch between internal and optical sound.

[Dancleary]

Hi, firstly thanks to all for a brilliant piece of software! I have one question...I currently have my joggler streaming wirelessly from my PC upstairs, everything working fine. What I am trying to do is get the joggler to stream music from my htpc which has the Openelec version of xbmc running on it. The htpc is visible when I press the upnp button on the joggler, and it brings up all the music up, so there is a share of some description enabled. I can then play the relevant video or music file, while this is great, i wouldn't be a joggler nut if i didn't try and replicate this share directly through squeeze on the joggler?

So OpenElec is serving out your media and you want that media to appear in SqueezePlay? You would need to make a share on OpenElec (never used it, so I don't know how this would be done) and then point Logitech Media Server, that I assume is running on your PC, at that share and get it to scan it. Then LMS will make that content available to SqueezePlay on the Joggler.

You mention 'the UPnP button'. I'm guessing you're not running SqueezePlay OS?

Roobarb, thanks for the reply. I guess the issue is with Openelec. Will post on the OE forums to see how to get LMS onto my htpc.

Dan

[JimbobVFR400]

Hi, firstly thanks to all for a brilliant piece of software! I have one question...I currently have my joggler streaming wirelessly from my PC upstairs, everything working fine. What I am trying to do is get the joggler to stream music from my htpc which has the Openelec version of xbmc running on it. The htpc is visible when I press the upnp button on the joggler, and it brings up all the music up, so there is a share of some description enabled. I can then play the relevant video or music file, while this is great, i wouldn't be a joggler nut if i didn't try and replicate this share directly through squeeze on the joggler?

So OpenElec is serving out your media and you want that media to appear in SqueezePlay? You would need to make a share on OpenElec (never used it, so I don't know how this would be done) and then point Logitech Media Server, that I assume is running on your PC, at that share and get it to scan it. Then LMS will make that content available to SqueezePlay on the Joggler.

You mention 'the UPnP button'. I'm guessing you're not running SqueezePlay OS?

Roobarb, thanks for the reply. I guess the issue is with Openelec. Will post on the OE forums to see how to get LMS onto my htpc.

Dan

What I do is have LMS running on the Joggler but mounting my music as a network drive. In my case this is a Buffalo NAS which is too crappy to run LMS on its own. I find SqueezePlay OS ideal for this because its not got any other stuff running, its dedicated as my main player and server with a hardwired Ethernet connection. As an added bonus I run SqPOS from a USB stick but have stuck this internally in the USB slot where the unneeded wireless card normally goes. I wasn't sure LMS would be happy running on internal flash as I'd imagine the database files could soon run out of space

[dwl99]

If it's a Buffalo Linkstation you can indeed run LMS on it.

[JimbobVFR400]

Yes you can but the performance by all accounts is rubbish. I'm not sure the LSL is up to the task, whereas my joggler is happily running the full server, several plugins and transcoding WMA etc etc.

Last time I tried getting it working on the Buffalo the web interface was running like treacle and scanning just a subset of my library took 4 hours (that was about 30Gig worth) so I dread to think how long a scan of my full library would take, maybe its got better since then but TBH I don't really care as the Joggler does the job so well IMO. (Especially with the absolutely fabulous SqPOS which is awesome, thanks Roobarb)

[Dancleary]

thanks jim bob, i would only be using the joggler as a squeezeplay device, so i will run it from a USB stick.

[JimbobVFR400]

Well depending on how much music you have you could even have your tunes on the USB stick I suppose. Although Mounting the music on my NAS was relatively simple

First of all Use Putty or similar to SSH or Telnet into your joggler

Code: Select all

cd /mnt
mkdir Music

This creates a folder we will be mounting your network share in (you may need to add sudo infront of the mkdir command, I can't remember

then:

Code: Select all

sudo nano /etc/fstab

This opens the fstab file for editing
I added the following line at the end of my file

Code: Select all

//192.168.1.5/music /mnt/music cifs username=jimbob,password=MYPASSWORD,_netdev 0 0

In my case my NAS has a share called music and a fixed IP address on my network of 192.168.1.5 (alternatively you could reserve the IP address in your router, as long as its the same everytime.
The _netdev on the end is to make sure the network connection on the Joggler is available before mounting, otherwise it can fail if there's no network connection.

The you reboot the joggler and use the web interface for LMS by going to [joggler IP]:9000 and set your music directory to be /mnt/music

Hope that makes sense

[Dancleary]

thanks again. I didn't check first time round but I have the post-update open peak firmware, as such the Sqpos doesn't seem to be loading via USB stick. I believe I can upgrade via telnet, could someone share these instructions?
Cheers!
Dan

[Dancleary]

Reflashed the joggler last night and installed sqpos with no worries. Thanks Roobarb for a great piece of software!

[JimbobVFR400]

I'm so sorry, it feels like I'm doing nothing but asking dumb questions at the moment

The Airplay emulation in the latest version is brilliant. I am using airfoil on my Laptop to stream Spotify to my joggler and it worked perfectly.

I say worked, because it doesn't anymore since I added an optical digital output to my joggler. With the following asound.conf file and the digital output un-muted in alsamixer the sound is working perfectly for squeezeplay, including menu sounds etc etc

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
   device 1
 }
pcm.dmixer  {
        type dmix
        ipc_key 1024
        slave {
                pcm "hw:0,1"
                period_time 0
                period_size 1024
                buffer_size 4096
                rate 44100
        }
        bindings {
                0 0
                1 1
        }
}

ctl.dmixer {
        type hw
        card 0
        device 1
}

However the Airplay has stopped working. The joggler still shows as an airplay speaker option in both Airfoil and iTunes on my PC and it happily appears to be playing to it. but no sound.

Its not a massive problem as I have DSBridge streaming the output from spotify as a streaming radio station and a "favorite" in squeezeplay to access it but I did quite like the airplay. Does anyone have any ideas. I've tried all options I can see in Alsamixer but none seem to make a difference.

[mdolan]

I have another dumb question. I reflashed my Joggler with 1.05 when it was initially released. I love it.

Is there any easy way to upgrade to 1.07 and retain my settings?

[JimbobVFR400]

I have another dumb question. I reflashed my Joggler with 1.05 when it was initially released. I love it.

Is there any easy way to upgrade to 1.07 and retain my settings?

I had 1.05 and used the update option in the Squeezeplay settings menu.

Now I'm not 100% this is now fully 1.07 but I certainly got the extra options (i.e. Airport) I'd expect to get with 1.07.

I think I'm still on kernel 3.2.21jog1 so this would imply I'm still on 1.05 but with the extra features from 1.07

Edit: After checking the changelogs it would appear that the above means I'm still on 1.05 but squeezeplay is the latest 1.51 (I think) It doesn't appear to be a massive change from 1.05 to 1.07 so I'll probably leave it as it is.

The changelogs are here:
Squeezeplay OS
Squeezeplay

As you can see I don't think theres that much difference from 05 to 07, much greater differences by upgrading squeezeplay and dead easy to do to boot

[roobarb!]

I must sort out my changelogs. I have sqpOS changes in the SqueezePlay log. Guess that's what happens when I work on them together.

[simonaldrich]

Hi All

Great forum, I'm really excited about the possibilities of the Joggler and how many helpful & inventive people there seem to in the community.

I've just (yesterday) acquired a Joggler with the intention of reflashing it with SqueezePlay OS. Unfortunately so far I've not had any luck getting either roobarb!'s reflash tool or the SqueezePlay OS image to boot successfully.

I've tried the following USB drives:

• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium Drive - 2GB
  Unknown brand flash drive- 4GB
  Sandisk Extreme SD Card (in USB card-reader) - 8GB
  Unknown brand flash drive (borrowed from a friend) - 32GB

In all cases the bootloader on the USB stick is kicking in, so clearly the Joggler can see the USB stick. I believe it is also finding the kernel and the initrd image (as it prints some stuff about the sizes of these to screen). Unfortunately it then gets no further. The LEDs on the drives are show no activity and even after leaving it for a 1/2 hour nothing further happens.

I know that the Joggler's USB port is working ok as I was able to reflash the Joggler with the latest official OpenPeak image hosted on this forum and the same SD card in the USB card-reader that I'd been trying to reflash SqueezePlay OS with.

My main question is; is this normal (bootloader working but getting no further)? Do I just need to keep experimenting with different USB drives or is there something further I can do to try to diagnose why the Joggler won't boot with roobarb!'s image?

All suggestions gratefully received

Simon

[hawsey]

Welcome to the fold Simon
I had big problems writing bootable images when I started and with me it boiled down to the programme I was using, I now use version 0.3 of the win32 disk imager on a W7 32 bit machine. My Acer revo on 64 bit just would not play ball.
You also have to extract the zip file first before writing if I remember rightly
Good luck

[simonaldrich]

Hi hawsey, thanks for the warm welcome

I have been using roobarb!'s Linux (dd) instructions for writing the image to the various USB devices I've tried so far.

After writing the joggler_reflash_109.img file to the device I'm then able to successfully mount both the first FAT16 partition (rfl-boot) and the second ext2 partition (rfl-root) off the USB device. This makes me think that the image write has been successful.

I'm going to try writing the image to a portable USB harddrive this evening to see if that helps at all.

Think I'm going to need all the luck I can get!

[hawsey]

Hmm not much help with Linux ,sorry .