Multiple Squeezebox Server Instances

[damcknight]

Has anyone managed to run multiple instances of Squeezebox Server on one machine? I found a wiki page describing this, but it seems pretty out of date. I am running Squeezebox Server 7.5.0 on a Debian (Squeeze) NAS.

[pfarrell]

damcknight wrote:
> Has anyone managed to run multiple instances of Squeezebox Server on one
> machine?

I have not tried it and I am doubtful that it would work. There has been
no discussion of it on the beta forums for 7.5

Why would you want to do that?

--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/

[Rajarajan Rajamani]

On 10:19 Sat 17 Apr , damcknight wrote:
>
> Has anyone managed to run multiple instances of Squeezebox Server on one
> machine? I found a wiki page describing this, but it seems pretty out
> of date. I am running Squeezebox Server 7.5.0 on a Debian (Squeeze)
> NAS.
>
Why would you want to do that ? Since it can support multiple clients - why
would you need multiple servers. But then to answery my own question - are you
looking for a different look/skin on different clients. Yes I have wished that
at times for e.g. when I try to control my squeezeserver via my phone vs using
my PC.

[damcknight]

I have not tried it and I am doubtful that it would work. There has been
no discussion of it on the beta forums for 7.5

Why would you want to do that?

I want to have 2 separate music libraries for flac and mp3s. I like being able to quickly browse by artist, album, genre, and year from the main menu, but I don't want to have duplicates of half my music. I guess the other option is to use the Multi Library/Custom Browse plugins. Do those work well with the Touch and iPeng?

[pfarrell]

damcknight wrote:
> I want to have 2 separate music libraries for flac and mp3s. I like
> being able to quickly browse by artist, album, genre, and year from the
> main menu, but I don't want to have duplicates of half my music. I guess
> the other option is to use the Multi Library/Custom Browse plugins.

Running two instances is not going to be fun. I'd look for alternative.

The Touch can act as a normal Squeezebox player,

Don't use iPeng, so I can't adress that, but I would expect it to work fine.



--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/

[aubuti]

I want to have 2 separate music libraries for flac and mp3s.

Not questioning your motives, but why? If some of your players are bandwidth constrained (eg, remote access over the internet, poor wifi in some location) then you use the bitrate limiting option to transcode to MP3 and send those to the relevant player(s).

Depending on the capabilities of your server, if you want to go ahead to two server instances you may find it easier to set up the second under a virtual machine. I use Sun's VirtualBox to do that, so that I can test beta versions of SBS running on the VM on some players, and run the latest stable SBS on the real machine. Using a virtual machine with VirtualBox or VMWare is almost certainly easier than sorting out dual instances of SBS on the same server.

[damcknight]

Not questioning your motives, but why? If some of your players are bandwidth constrained (eg, remote access over the internet, poor wifi in some location) then you use the bitrate limiting option to transcode to MP3 and send those to the relevant player(s).

Band width is not a problem, since I have my Squeezebox wired into the network. I would prefer to listen to my music in a loss-less format which is why I am using flac, but I also need mp3 versions of everything to use in itunes and sync to my ipod. Hence 2 copies of everything, except for the things that I bought on itunes.

It sounds like either using the Multi Library plugin or Virtual Machine are my best bet for now. I am really surprised by how little support there is for multiple libraries, not just for the Squeezebox but for itunes and digital media players in general. It seems like such a basic feature. I read somewhere that this feature may come in Squeezebox Server version 8.

[Mnyb]

But why not just have the mp3 in one folder and the flac's in another ?

And point squeezeboxserves music library to the flac folder

iTunes can not deal with flac files anyway ?

But if all your mp3 are duplicates of what you have in flac, and you never ever want to see them in squeezeboxserver.

There is a setting:

In the web interface go to settings > advanced > filetypes

here you can "Disabled Audio File Extensions" so if you put mp3 here, and does a full clear and rescan squeezeboxserver should not read them.

[fragfutter]

i didn't try, but with a second ip address this might be possible

/usr/sbin/squeezeboxserver \
--prefsdir /var/lib/squeezeboxserver1/prefs \
--logdir /var/log/squeezeboxserver1/ \
--cachedir /var/lib/squeezeboxserver1/cache \
--httpaddr 1.2.3.1 \
--cliaddr 1.2.3.1


/usr/sbin/squeezeboxserver \
--prefsdir /var/lib/squeezeboxserver2/prefs \
--logdir /var/log/squeezeboxserver2/ \
--cachedir /var/lib/squeezeboxserver2/cache \
--httpaddr 1.2.3.2 \
--cliaddr 1.2.3.2

no idea how plugins behave and where they leave the files.

[epoch1970]

It sounds like either using the Multi Library plugin or Virtual Machine are my best bet for now. I am really surprised by how little support there is for multiple libraries, not just for the Squeezebox but for itunes and digital media players in general. It seems like such a basic feature. I read somewhere that this feature may come in Squeezebox Server version 8.

I tend to agree. The iPod is not going away, and Flac in iTunes probably not going to happen.
I run an SC server in a Virtualbox VM, runs globally fine. If you choose to bridge the VM with a physical interface in the computer, the SB Server will see the players ok. (With NAT or some other settings the server / players discovery will not happen.)
I guess you could also use a "jail" instead of a full VM, but that's going to be a lot of trouble for just a little gain in reliability, if any.

But perhaps FUSE can help: http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/
I never used this particular layer; But supposedly you could emerge a hierarchy of mp3 files for consumption with iTunes ?