KEXP uncompressed

[MadCityGeoff]

Hi, everyone. I know that the topic of playing the KEXP uncompressed stream over SqueezeCenter has been discussed here before. I'm bringing it up again because the solution that worked for other people doesn't for me. I'm running SqueezeCenter 7.3.3 on Mac OSX Leopard. I've got a Squeezebox Duet and an older model, an SB3, I think.

I've tried a variety of URLs for the KEXP uncompressed stream, but they all seem to resolve to this one:

mms://140.142.8.217:80/KEXP-uncompressed?MSWMExt=.asf

As I understand it, some people on this forum have been able to play this stream by disabling onboard Windows Media support in the SqueezeCenter file type settings. When I select the "disabled" option for Windows Media, the SqueezeBox display reports "problem: unable to play file type" If I select the "native" option, the stream seems to flow (the time counter keeps incrementing), but there's no audio.

I've seen other variations including a "no items in playlist" message. Some times the stream starts up and then stops after a few seconds and then stops. In no case do I get audio.

Can anybody help?

[bpa]

For OSX if you disable WMA decoding - then you need some app to do the mms transport decoding within the PC such as mplayer via the AlienBBC plugin.

Then try the URL

mms://media-wm.cac.washington.edu/KEXP-Uncompressed

[MadCityGeoff]

That worked! Thank you!

[ChrisG]

Apologies in advance for the newbie quality of this, my first post. I've read what I could find on the forums and wiki, and I'm stumped.

Background: I'm currently in the process of moving my music to the Squeezebox system. Right now, I'm configuring the Squeezebox Server v7.4.0 (on a Ubuntu box), loading up my music library in FLAC format, etc. and testing everything using SoftSqueeze and SqueezePlay (i.e. keeping it simple by avoiding the use of Squeezebox hardware -- I'll add that into the mix once I have the software side of things working). It's all going smoothly, with one exception: I can't seem to get the KEXP.org uncompressed stream at

mms://media-wm.cac.washington.edu/KEXP-Uncompressed

to work. Reading up on the issue in the forums, etc. tells me that this URL leads to an uncompressed WAV, which is not what Squeezebox Server is expecting from mms. A few posts have indicated that unchecking Windows Media "built-in" in the Server settings, or (as mentioned in the post above) disabling WMA decoding, should do the trick.

My question is, how do I do this with the 7.4.x Server? Accessing it via its web interface, I navigate to Settings > Advanced > File Types, and I see options for Windows Media, WMA Lossless, and WMAPro, amongst others. What exactly should be the configuration of these various options? I've tried numerous combinations of different settings for the above file types, as well as entering "wma" in the Disabled Audio File Extensions, without any luck; all such attempts lead to the player saying either "Unable to play file type", or "Unable to parse ASF audio".

Any ideas? I'm happy to do more research, if only I could figure out what I should be reading...

[bpa]

Same issue as post #2

if you disable WMA decoding - then you need some app to do the mms transport decoding within the PC such as mplayer via the AlienBBC plugin.

[ChrisG]

Thanks for the reply. So, I need to configure mplayer on the Ubuntu (server) machine, as well as adding the AlienBBC plugin; is that correct? Are there any references or tutorials you could point me towards that might give me a basic understanding of how this works and how it's done?

And then, once I have that working, disable all decoding of "WMA Lossless" on the Squeezebox Server (including setting the "WMA Lossless" stream format under WMA Lossless from "Native" to "Disabled")?

[bpa]

KEXP pretends that is a WMA stream - you disable WMA NOT WMA lossless.

With Ubuntu just install mplayer from the Ubuntu package manager - just make sure it is the "no GUI" version. Install mplayer before AlienBBC.

Install ALienBBC plugin from WebUI Plugins settings. The WMA support is historical and not the main reason for AlienBBC so there is little mention of it. Are you running 7.4.* or 7.3.* - if 7.4 then you will need to install AlienBBC beta 2.6.

[ChrisG]

So, to sum up:

I need to use mplayer (via the AlienBBC plugin) to do the transcoding from the WAV (provided by the KEXP stream) to FLAC.

And I must disable WMA. Presumably I must do the latter directly in /etc/squeezeboxserver/custom-convert.conf, since the Squeezebox Server's web interface does not appear to have any option to disable plain WMA (as opposed to WMA Lossless, WMAPro, etc.) within the Settings page.

Are there examples out there of the lines required in custom-convert.conf to disable WMA? Or a tutorial on how to handle this file?

[bpa]

You disable using the WebUI Settings/Advanced/Filetypes - and change the drop down box of the Windows Media "Native" entry to "Disabled".

[ChrisG]

Addendum to my last: I installed mplayer-nogui, got the beta version of AlienBBC (since I'm running version 7.4 of the Squeezebox Server) and installed it, added the KEXP mms URL as a station, and finally, changed my File Types configuration as you instructed. Shamefacedly, I must admit that I didn't realize that "Windows Media" under the File Types was the same thing as WMA -- duh -- and I see that you just explained that in a new post. :-)

Anyway, thanks for your help. It's working now.