iPeng & Duet - Empty Album List

[rawdon51]

Hi. New to the Squeezebox and though I like what I see so far am having some issues with iPeng. Specifically, having successfully connected iPeng to my Duet receiver, I can browse through artists, but when I access "Albums", all I get is a blank(ish) screen with feint divider lines across that I can scroll up & down, but nothing to access (i.e. touching does nothing). I have around 370 albums that I imported through iTunes (i.e. ripped, not downloaded), and I can see the album list without issues (other than some missing artwork) in Web Control.

I am on Squeezebox Server v 7.5.0 on Windows XP. iPeng 1.2.1 downloaded from Itune Store just today. Anyone any ideas? Thanks. Jon.

[pippin]

Hi. New to the Squeezebox and though I like what I see so far am having some issues with iPeng. Specifically, having successfully connected iPeng to my Duet receiver, I can browse through artists, but when I access "Albums", all I get is a blank(ish) screen with feint divider lines across that I can scroll up & down, but nothing to access (i.e. touching does nothing). I have around 370 albums that I imported through iTunes (i.e. ripped, not downloaded), and I can see the album list without issues (other than some missing artwork) in Web Control.

I am on Squeezebox Server v 7.5.0 on Windows XP. iPeng 1.2.1 downloaded from Itune Store just today. Anyone any ideas? Thanks. Jon.

Does browsing through the artists actually work (that is: can you descend into an artist, album etc)?
Could it be that the server was still scanning when you opened iPeng?
Please try "Settings->iPeng Settings->Flush Cache". Does this help?

If all of this does NOT change the issue I bet you are using a McAfee virus scanner... OK, the issue is the same with some others. Please try to exclude "*.MYI" files from scanning, for McAfee see also this thread:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=56785

[rawdon51]

Pippin - many thanks for the advice. I'd read about the *.MY? issues but had assumed that this would just prevent album art being displayed, not the whole listings. I'm using MS Security Essentials - just added the exclusion, stopped & started the AV & hey presto, lovely listing of all my albums!!

Just one more things that seems to be occurring now - the thing I have been most impressed with so far about the Squeezebox has been the rock solid transmission. I've actually swapped from an Airport Express as the connectivity to my wireless from that was unbelievably intermittent. However, when playing songs through Squeezebox from my iPeng right now, I'm getting substantial break-up. I notice there seems to be a LOT of network traffic from the PC where I have my Squeezebox server. I guess time will tell but jut wondered if you knew, was this due to initial cacheing or something like that?....as I say, this hasn't happened so far when I control the receiver from the Squeezebox controller, only from the iPeng. Many thanks again & kudos to you. Jon.

[pippin]

I guess time will tell but jut wondered if you knew, was this due to initial cacheing or something like that?

Probably yes. Do you have a large library?
iPeng does two things:
1. It caches albums, artists and genres. Only "Albums" is critical, you can follow the progress of this by going to "Albums", there will be a blue progress bar on the top.
2. It caches artwork (thumbnails) and 450 of those upon startup. Since iPeng uses a different artwork size than the Squeezebox interfaces themselves the server has to re-size the artwork the first time you use it, this can consume significant CPU time on slower machines causing the interruptions (I don't think it's the communication itself). But the data is being cached by iPeng and also by the server so the re-sizing only has to be re-done whenever you do a "clear and rescan" of your whole library.

Oh, and on the ".MY?" issue: in most cases it doesn't already hit on the first chunk of albums being read from the server since that one is smaller than consecutive ones so usually people see some albums but no artwork. I assume your server doesn't have a lot of RAM?

EDIT: I see that you are using iTunes integration: That may add additional computing requirements, iTunes is a memory (and CPU) hog similar to Squeezebox Server so I believe that combination may cause your stutter. Please write back if this persists, I believe it should go away after a few minutes.

[rawdon51]

Thanks again. I think it's settled down a little now, fingers crossed. You're right about the lack of RAM - just a standard browsing PC, nothing special. In terms of iTunes, I guess after years of steering away from Apple (been in IT for 20 years or so...) I finally fell for the hype having found the iTouch great for many things. The Airport Express with iTunes seemed like a natural progression, but so far the Squeezebox blows the AE away. Maybe I should ditch iTunes altogether?.....thanks for now anyway.