Well, I was enthusiastic about this as a solution to the CD problem. Alas, enthusiasm does not survive acquaintance.
I installed it on an old emachines tiny little AMD machine and it went in perfectly. The first few CDs ripped perfectly also. Then the problems start. It uses autoripper, which hangs or fails to find the metadata. The first result is that you get 'unknown' albums and tracks and artists. Fine, you can fix this. But its manual and tedious, has to be done from the command line or else from Nautilus over ssh, and in either case you seem to have to fix every track manually..
However, having done one of these or failed to, it hangs. And then it will not autorip again until you do a hardware restart.
Its headless of course, so all this has to be command line, which is fine, except that lots of the interesting tools are GUI, which means putting in X11 and X11 forwarding.
Then we have playing. Well, it has squeezebox server as the default. This appears to sell in hardware boxes for huge amounts, but I cannot for the life of me see why. Its open source, but why would anyone want it? Or maybe its for a completely different purpose? All I want to do is get my CDs onto a computer and listen to the music, probably over the local net but also its fine to listen to them on the device itself controlled from a tablet.
So, what to do? Well, the solution seems to be what a wiser head suggested at the start of this process. Just rip your CDs manually, in fact do the whole thing manually.
The other problem is the player. I am not sure if this is the emachines headphone output. But the volume is very low. It seems that the coding process automatically attenuates the sound by soe 6-8db. So its necessary to get a headphone amp (the Topping ones seem to be the choice). Or else in some unknown way fix this?
A very interesting article a while ago, a guy had done his own ripping and then installed squeezebox on an old HP thin client. He used the internal usb ports to put in one flash drive for Debian and another for his music. One can see all kinds of advantages to that...... Though why he picked squeezebox is a mystery.
Its not nice to be overly critical about something which enthusiasts are doing and releasing out of the goodness of their hearts, but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else!
Al
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 09:52:10AM +0100, Peter Alcibiades wrote: [snip tale of woe about vortexbox]
Its not nice to be overly critical about something which enthusiasts are doing and releasing out of the goodness of their hearts, but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else!
I've found somewhat the same, simple, straightforward solutions for playing music are thin on the ground.
I have a Squeezebox Radio which is a very neat and effective internet radio but the (now becoming unsupported) software is a bit wierd and there's all sorts of external servers it can use which seem to offer little more useful function.
For music I'm using mpd to play the music and various clients to drive mpd but it still feels rather a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
On 10/09/13 11:25, Chris Green wrote:
For music I'm using mpd to play the music and various clients to drive mpd but it still feels rather a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Not really sure why you think that. I use mpd and a mix of the android client and ncmpcpp and it's almost perfect.
My wife wanted a dedicated bit of hardware to control volume and play music from, rather than relying on her phone. That was simple enough I just took an old O2 Joggler and shoved android on it and used the MPDroid client.
Lovely clean interface and decent enough search and playlist features. Oh and the best bit...if we wanted multiroom all I'd need is more jogglers and some decent amplified speakers (AE Aego M gets my vote) because MPDroid supports audio redirection....or I can just redirect to my phone and plug headphones in.
I use XMBC for videos and TV etc but it's a little cumbersome for Music playback so I just run the mpd server alongside it on the same set top box...the music itself lives on my HP Mini server and is connected via NFS.
Oh then pointing at the same library I have k-playlist running on the server so if I want to stream something to the office I can.
On 10/09/13 09:52, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Well, I was enthusiastic about this as a solution to the CD problem. Alas, enthusiasm does not survive acquaintance.
[]
So, what to do? Well, the solution seems to be what a wiser head suggested at the start of this process. Just rip your CDs manually, in fact do the whole thing manually.
The other problem is the player. I am not sure if this is the emachines headphone output. But the volume is very low. It seems that the coding process automatically attenuates the sound by soe 6-8db. So its necessary to get a headphone amp (the Topping ones seem to be the choice). Or else in some unknown way fix this?
Volume: IME, most distros have a volume control widget of some sort, and many of them allow you to select the output device, volume levels on the output device and a master volume. For example, I have output devices Headphones/No Amplifier, and Headphones/Amplifier amongst others. In the past I'm fairly sure that selecting a different output device has had a dramatic affect on the output volume. I would suggest finding a volume control widget for your distro, check if you can chose an output device, and if so, if any are louder than any others. Also, check the volumes for each device, and the master volume. Of course there is probably also a volume control in the playback app and this can sometimes be entirely separate from the other volume controls mentioned earlier.
[]
Its not nice to be overly critical about something which enthusiasts are doing and releasing out of the goodness of their hearts, but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else!
Well may I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave earlier....
25 Jul 2013 approx 1PM, subject "Re: [ALUG] linux equivalent for Cocktail Audio X10 HDD HiFi"
HTH Steve
Thanks, yes, this is what it was - I fired up alsamixer over the ssh connection and it worked, so its now listenable locally driven from another machine..
Then as an interim I started ripping using sound-juicer on my desktop, and then copy over the files into the /storage folder on the vortexbox. Nautilus makes this pretty easy. This works fairly well too. Someone suggests ABCDE, but vortexbox refuses to install it for dependency reasons. Who knows?
Well may I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave earlier....
Yes, I remembered your advice at a certain point when up to my knees in this stuff! I had foolishly thought it was all too complicated when you could just use vortexbox. Life is not like that.
I think were I doing it again from scratch it would be a minimalist debian install with ssh on it. Dunno what for a media server. Maybe squeezebox is OK once the rest gets straightened out. There is no way I would use autorip however.
The thing that is very confusing in all this (at least for the inexperienced) is keeping track when accessing over ssh what is happening where. Like for instance, where exactly the stuff is going to start playing! I still have not figured out how to make the server play on my tablet, that is next. I can make it play on itself, when ordered to by the tablet, so that is a start.
CDs were pretty much like LPs, so though there was innovation, it was trivial in terms of what you had to master. But this stuff. How on earth do the less sophisticated ever manage? I guess they just use MP3s on iPods...
Al
On Tuesday 10 September 2013 13:51:54 steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 10/09/13 09:52, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Well, I was enthusiastic about this as a solution to the CD problem. Alas, enthusiasm does not survive acquaintance.
[]
So, what to do? Well, the solution seems to be what a wiser head suggested at the start of this process. Just rip your CDs manually, in fact do the whole thing manually.
The other problem is the player. I am not sure if this is the emachines headphone output. But the volume is very low. It seems that the coding process automatically attenuates the sound by soe 6-8db. So its necessary to get a headphone amp (the Topping ones seem to be the choice). Or else in some unknown way fix this?
Volume: IME, most distros have a volume control widget of some sort, and many of them allow you to select the output device, volume levels on the output device and a master volume. For example, I have output devices Headphones/No Amplifier, and Headphones/Amplifier amongst others. In the past I'm fairly sure that selecting a different output device has had a dramatic affect on the output volume. I would suggest finding a volume control widget for your distro, check if you can chose an output device, and if so, if any are louder than any others. Also, check the volumes for each device, and the master volume. Of course there is probably also a volume control in the playback app and this can sometimes be entirely separate from the other volume controls mentioned earlier.
[]
Its not nice to be overly critical about something which enthusiasts are doing and releasing out of the goodness of their hearts, but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else!
Well may I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave earlier....
25 Jul 2013 approx 1PM, subject "Re: [ALUG] linux equivalent for Cocktail Audio X10 HDD HiFi"
HTH Steve
My own setup is a raspberry pi in the cupboard under the telly, with the audio running into the stereo system line-in and an external powered usb drive for my music collection. I have a few sd cards with different distros on them for different purposes, simply plugging the card in to the pi for the job at hand.
For my mp3/ogg playing I have a card with raspbian installed, set to boot to command line only, with mpd, ssh and samba running. I rip my music from my desktop, editing metadata with picard if necessary, and copy them over to the samba share. I ssh into the pi if I need to change anything.
For playing the music I use an mpd client on my android phone (there are various ones). The electricity supply for pi and the usb drive are connected to a single power supply remote control. So to play my music there is a bit of remote control juggling hell, but it can all be done from the horizontal position on the sofa; power on the pi & usb drive, power on the stereo & open up the mpd client on my phone and press play.
If I remember when setting it up months ago, I had to play with alsamixer after ssh'ing into the pi to get the sound right, but once done I haven't touched it. The only thing I have to remember is, if I was using a different distro previously that needed a gui, is to unplug the hdmi cable first - otherwise the sound goes to the telly and not to the stereo through the audio out jack-plug.
Obviously not everyone's idea of a music system but it suits me OK.
Regards,
Martin
On 10/09/13 09:52, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
but all I can say is, this is not really working for me. Time to look for something else!
Al
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For auto-ripping I use a script called 'abcde', works well, I just insert a CD and a directory for it appears in my mediaserver where it also gets uploaded to Google Music. Uses standard tools, very configurable and I've not had a problem with it getting the metadata: http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/
RE headphone output, have a poke about in the mixer. I usually find that with everything turned up max the output is too loud for 'line level' and so gets clipped. Later versions of alsamixer show a 'db gain' value which for the PCM channel seems to be zero at around 74% on an AC97.
RE playing, I've given up due to having to 'declutter' the wires all over the house, now I play from Google Music on my phone to the Hifi using a Bluetooth A2DP receiver. Far from ideal quality wise but it's convenient, lets other people join when needed.
When the house was wired up I had Amarok running in VNC on the server with a smart (random) playlist and Amarok Remote on the phone. I also had scripts to pick up the output of other PCs' music players using Icecast.
Neil
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 07:25:16PM +0100, Neil Sedger wrote: [snip]
When the house was wired up I had Amarok running in VNC on the server with a smart (random) playlist and Amarok Remote on the
I think I must live in a different world from most people! :-)
A random playlist on my music collection would switch between Mahler Symphonies, pre-war recordings of old time string bands, australian aborigine music, gregorian chant and almost any other genre you can think of.
When I play some music I want at least to choose the style/genre.
phone. I also had scripts to pick up the output of other PCs' music players using Icecast.
On 11/09/2013 08:48, Chris Green wrote:
When I play some music I want at least to choose the style/genre.
hmm that's a bit trickier... I usually sit by the 'next' button or insert a particular album into the playlist. Not pretty with a phone client though.
How do you do it with mpd?
Amarok's 'dynamic playlists' can be configured on genre (requires correctly tagged files) or will use echonest or last.fm to pick similar tracks. Maybe the phone client lets you select a preconfigured playlist.
Or separate instances each looking at a different folder structure, don't know of a friendly way to choose instance from a phone though, unless mpd clients have a server discovery list feature.
Neil
For those people with a Raspberry Pi in their linux systems in order to play music might like to have a look at this posting today - http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4817
There's a comment on there which might satisfy Chris Green's desire for hifi with a Pi and that's the bit about hooking it up to USB DACs.
On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 04:55:51PM +0100, Chris Walker wrote:
For those people with a Raspberry Pi in their linux systems in order to play music might like to have a look at this posting today - http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4817
There's a comment on there which might satisfy Chris Green's desire for hifi with a Pi and that's the bit about hooking it up to USB DACs.
I'm already using a Behringer UFO202 USB DAC with my little Acer Revo system which runs mpd. So the quality is pretty reasonable. (The Acer Revo is also my local DNS server and does a couple of other things, I guess I could use a Pi which would use less power but the Revo is OK)
As regards selecting stuff to play via mpd I've not found an Android client that really makes it easy to find stuff but on a Linux box Gnome Music Player Client seems to work pretty well for me.
On 11/09/13 16:55, Chris Walker wrote:
There's a comment on there which might satisfy Chris Green's desire for hifi with a Pi and that's the bit about hooking it up to USB DACs.
Also don't forget that there are readily available boxes that will source audio from the HDMI connector as well. If you are using the Pi in an audio only application then don't waste CPU cycles and precious (on the pi) USB bandwidth when you could use the otherwise redundant HDMI out.
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Chris Green -
Chris Walker -
Martin -
Neil Sedger -
Peter Alcibiades -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk -
Wayne Stallwood