[MUSIC] New Squeezecenter music jukebox for NMT

[jecdk]

(01-11-2009 01:31 PM)Nautilus Wrote:  ... with SqueezeCenter 7.3. and upwards the "Handheld" skin works quite ok through the PCH (also playback & other features)....

I too has SqueezeCenter 7.3 (7.3.1) running on a QNAP and uses the "Handheld" skin through PCH.
I can see the Status, Playlist and other things, but I am not able to manage (start/stop) playback. Most controls just send me to the page requesting me to press "Return".

Do you have any special tricks to manage playback & other features ?

Jens

[stuart]

(01-11-2009 10:21 PM)trotsky10 Wrote:  Hi thanks.

I know it will be possible and fairly straightforward. after I release the paylist sections I want to add the search artist and search song screens. After that I wish to link up with lastfm to provide artist information when you click on the artist name in the album detail screen (and maybe album information too).

Then if there is enough interest I can do the changes and write the skin for playing through the NMT itself.

What am I not seeing here?

Let me know if my assumptions are wrong, but...

The only current way to play back any media on the NMT (music or video) is to use the native player. The native player takes over the screen, audio, video and (probably) the remote control input. The SlimDevices paradigm is that nearly all remote control commands are filtered through the SqueezeCenter server (the only exception that I can think of is the pause button - and the server eventually gets told that any ways).

So how are you going to use the NMT as a SqueezeCenter client? I can see kicking play lists off. But after that, all the normal interfaces a "SqueezeCenter user" expects will be missing.

I expect the experience will be something like:
1) Play something (play list, track, ect...)
2) When that's done, play something else.
3) If you really want to, press the stop button.

No, skipping forwards, backwards, no SqeezeCenter menus, no browsing during playback, none of the normal SqueezeCenter nice to haves.

Let me know if I'm wrong - but until we get access to the hardware drivers - well - I think the SqueezeCenter *playback* experience will be much better on a number of "other" platforms:

SqueezeBox: http://slimdevices.com/
Roku: http://www.permanence.com/SlimRoku/
MediaMVP: http://www.mvpmc.org/
Unix: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/slimp3slave/
Mythtv: http://mythsqueezebox.sourceforge.net/

------------------------------
Added later...

After reading my post, wow, I didn't mean to sound so negative. I concede that I presented the classic way SqueezeCenter works. But even if you use the CLI to control the server, you still forsake that control during play back. Or, maybe you have worked through these issues. If so, great, I'd like to get back in the game and help out. If not, well, my worries are that many of the hoops to be jump through to get playback sort-of working will be unnecessary once the hardware drivers are available. And if that is never to be - then, like I said, there are many alternatives that come closer to supporting or fully support the feature set of SqueezeCenter clients.

[trotsky10]

Hi stuart,

Yes you are right. Until the NMT will allow browsing while music is playing you will be stuck with the functionality you mentioned and not have all the functionality that comes with controlling a squeezebox to play.

Sorry if what I said was misleading. what I mean't to say is that it would be fairly easy to change the menus to let the NMT play the music but at that point you will not be able to use the menu until the music is stopped or finished much like (I would think) the current music jukeboxes that exist for the NMT. which is why it is not high priority for me to be embarking on this conversion.

[trotsky10]

New version SqueezeNMT v0.6
=========================

SqueezeNMT v0.6

Includes:

New Now Playing menu and Playlist menu
New and faster Main menu page linked to Home button on the remote
Allow adding albums/songs/playlists to the end of the currently playing playlist
Custom port configuration in the properties file

Check the first post for links and screenshots

Enjoy! :-)

[stuart]

(01-12-2009 11:24 PM)trotsky10 Wrote:  New version SqueezeNMT v0.6
=========================

SqueezeNMT v0.6

Includes:

New Now Playing menu and Playlist menu
New and faster Main menu page linked to Home button on the remote
Allow adding albums/songs/playlists to the end of the currently playing playlist
Custom port configuration in the properties file

Check the first post for links and screenshots

Enjoy! :-)

The screen shots look good. Nice work. I'll have to try this application out in the near future.

...thanks for your efforts

[trotsky10]

To update everyone.

In adding the playlists I had to start using the CLI interface instead of the xml interface as slimdevices/logitech are not supporting the xml interface anymore and it had a bug in the playlist section.

What I found was a huge increase in speed as can be seen in the playlist menu (not the Now playing menu).

I have embarked on slowly porting the other screens over to CLI which should speed up the menus a bit more.

After that I will be adding a search artist menu and search song menu not to mention the link to artist/album information frm last.fm.

:-)

[stuart]

(01-13-2009 04:56 PM)trotsky10 Wrote:  To update everyone.

In adding the playlists I had to start using the CLI interface instead of the xml interface as slimdevices/logitech are not supporting the xml interface anymore and it had a bug in the playlist section.

What I found was a huge increase in speed as can be seen in the playlist menu (not the Now playing menu).

I have embarked on slowly porting the other screens over to CLI which should speed up the menus a bit more.

After that I will be adding a search artist menu and search song menu not to mention the link to artist/album information frm last.fm.

:-)

Ah, the CLI is something I know about as the MClient feature inside of the mvpmc.org application uses a mix of old and new slimdevice protocols. Let me know if you need help w/that. But I doubt that Slimdevices will be dropping the older interface as I am sure there are many uses with older slimdevices hardware.

Things that I remember off the top of my head: There is no CLI command to tell you what menu your are in. At one time, streaming sources did not autonomously announce new track information (you neede to continuously poll for it). That's all I remember right now.

[spud]

This seems really a great tool. But...

I have a Synology DS107+ NAS (arm based if I'm not mistaken). Has anybody got java & jetty working on this type of NAS?

Or can we start begging for a non-java dependent version of the tool
Or maybe somebody knows of any other webGUI/Client for squeezecenter that we can use for the NMT (not the handheld interface).

[dc11ab]

See post #33-34:
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...9#pid92809

Hope this helps.

[trotsky10]

Thanks dc11ab. I'll add that information to the Installation guide on the project page.

Stuart much appreciated. when I hit a stumbling block I'll give you a shout.

To all. I noticed a bug in the new version where when you click on an album on the Genre Menu and then click on previous menu using the html link it takes you to the artist menu. For now you can get round that using the previous button on your remote (mulitple time if you have hit play or add on music tracks).

I have fixed this but only in the 720combo skin. I would like to know if anyone uses any of the other skins (720combo is the default) and if not then I will remove the others. If there are others used can you tell me so I can fix the xsl stylesheets in those skins also.

Thanks.

[spud]

Thx dc11ab! But the CS406 uses a PPC CPU and not an ARM based CPU like my NAS (500MHz ARM Marvel). I believe the problem is finding a working java binary for this platform, not so much the jetty app server.

[trotsky10]

(01-14-2009 11:10 AM)spud Wrote:  Thx dc11ab! But the CS406 uses a PPC CPU and not an ARM based CPU like my NAS (500MHz ARM Marvel). I believe the problem is finding a working java binary for this platform, not so much the jetty app server.

Does the embedded java that comes with jetty not work standalone?

I set up jetty on my Asus EEE B202 box and did not install any other version of Java then just started the jetty server and it then uses it's own java jre.

[spud]

I'll give it a shot tonight and let you know
thx!

[spud]

Still at work, I came across this: http://www.synology.com/wiki/index.php/J...y_Products

Anybody already has jamVM + Jetty running together? Or can tell me how to do it?

[trotsky10]

(01-14-2009 05:16 PM)spud Wrote:  Still at work, I came across this: http://www.synology.com/wiki/index.php/J...y_Products

Anybody already has jamVM + Jetty running together? Or can tell me how to do it?

I would try with just a straight jetty installation first to see if it works without any extra Java install but as I don't have the a QNAP I can't really guide more.