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| Squeezebox update and forum guidelines by Ray of Light 03/23/2008, 8:15pm PDT | ||||
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PLEASE READ: It's been two weeks with the Squeezebox. I'm impressed by the software; you can choose between mature-but-clunky v6, called Slimserver, or late-beta v7 which was renamed SqueezeCenter. The beta gets you antialiased fonts on the device, a mysql backend (replacing sqlite) and AJAXish web interface that is sluggish but otherwise pleasant to use. The server, being Perl-based, is omni-platform; I'm using Debian on minimal-spec hardware and it runs well (device response to remote inputs is instant; searches complete in one second, or about three times faster than Winmop on a maximal-spec desktop). There are complaints about poor Windows performance; some turn out to be the fault of virus scanners, and some don't. The supplied mysql config (stored in my.tt) is niggardly about memory; you the user must adjust all those numbers upward to get good performance with large libraries. Plugins are a mixed bag. Out of millions extant, there are maybe 100 that work and 10 that are any good. Hickinbottom's "Lazy Search" and "AutoRescan", plus Peter W.'s "StatusFirst" addressed my most pressing UI concerns. I've otherwise left the plugin world unexplored. Honorable mention goes to Av Erland Isaksson who has a bunch of fancy plugins that some people are very excited about. Having all the tag info in a real, queryable database is a (new to me and) very exciting development. For example, I was having genre headaches around the time Zseni started a thread about it, because without genre tags the shuffle function can't successfully exclude albums like "Verbal Advantage Complete Vocabulary." Most library browsers have a spreadsheet-style interface that's fine for "genre=Audiobook" but sucks at "(genre=*Audio* or *Book* or *Self-Help*) OR (tracks_per_album > 20)." With the squeezecenter database and a decent grasp of SQL (or, in my case, a pidgin grasp of SQL and a knack for some other text-processing language) this kind of search is possible and not all that hard. I also made a query to show all the genres that appeared in only one or two directories ("#IndieTorrents @ EFnet"), and cleaned those with Tag&Rename, refiling as one of the eight kinds of music that I like. |
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Squeezebox update and forum guidelines by 03/23/2008, 8:15pm PDT  We have appropriate forums? by 03/23/2008, 8:29pm PDT |
