playing audio from squeezebox server on debian CLI

[hyenadog]

Hi,

managed (as a complete linux newbie) to get the latest stable squeezebox server installed on CLI debian (hard part was sorting out SBS reading music files from automounted USB drive).

what i originally had in mind is using this little miniservers (running SBS) audio output to feed my powered speakers BUT ...

I have a couple of problems now still (one of which may be a gamechanger or mediaserver changer in this case)

1. testing it with squeezeplay beta on a networked xp pc it streams mp3 ok but errors on unprotected wma ??? (unable to play file type)it was my understanding that the latest versiion of SBS had inbuilt wma support ??? any ideas whats going on ???

2. From recollection (having had an old slimserver running a couple of years ago on xp) I had the SBS playing music locally on the xp machines speakers (wma and mp3) which is exactly what i was looking for with debian CLI on this little arm box ...

now when i try to log in to SBS via browser (which works fine) on a remote pc then i can select music etc but when i try to play a file nothing happens - no sound, volume control stays fixed on zero, no evidence of playing the song on SBS whether mp3 or wma .. whats going on ??

Am i going to be able to do what i want to and play the output of debian CLI/SBS box through its audio outputs ?? or just move to another media server to do it ??

Ive also installed FFMPEG and Mplayer with absolutely no impact on the above issues

TIA for any help

ian

[hyenadog]

hi,

after quite a bit of complete linux newbie research ive managed to get a build of squeezeslave running "v. 0.9-173" and everything working (albeit with a lot of jitters as it plays) .. god this linux stuff is such hard work compared to win :-(

when i finalise how best to run squeezeslave as a daemon automatically (if thats the right linux speak) i'm hoping this will get rid of the jittery mp3 playback - i'll post a newbies faq to help a huge number of ppl out installing and setting it up on linux from a non techie perspective if and when i get these issues ironed out.

The only major problem im left with now is that it cant play wma's (unprotected) ... and i have not a clue why :-(

once this agro has ended in the win 7 debian VM and hopefully all the issues are ironed out then its on to the little dockstar and put all of it hopefully on that ...


once again .. anyone have any ideas on how to sort out my SBS (latest debian version running in a win7 Vbox) as neither it or squeezeslave or squeezeplay can play unprotected wma's ..

thx in advance

[bpa]

once again .. anyone have any ideas on how to sort out my SBS (latest debian version running in a win7 Vbox) as neither it or squeezeslave or squeezeplay can play unprotected wma's ..

Only hardware players have native decoder for WMA. WMA support by Logitech for players without native WMA (e.g.SliMP3, SB1, SOftsqueeze, Squeezeplay, Squeezelsave) by server transcoding is only provided on Windows based servers as MS only provides necessary WMA decoder libraries for Windows.

To play WMA lossy files and streams on software player where the servers is on Linux or OSX you need to install the Play Windows Media (aka PlayWMA) plugin and also install mplayer (non GUI version) which will actually do the decoding.

[ralphy]

after quite a bit of complete linux newbie research ive managed to get a build of squeezeslave running "v. 0.9-173" and everything working (albeit with a lot of jitters as it plays)

Try adding -y84 to the command line when starting squeezeslave. If you still experience broken audio try increasing the value by 10 and try again.

[hyenadog]

worked perfectly with -y84 and immediately got rid of the jitter .. many thx

now all i need to do is work out how to setup sbs to do the on the fly transcode of wma to mp3/wav

its a big pity squeezeslave cant use (without including them in squeezeslave) the codecs Mplayer uses to play wma perfectly

thx

[bpa]

now all i need to do is work out how to setup sbs to do the on the fly transcode of wma to mp3/wav

Have you installed the "Play Windows Media" plugin ? It will do all the necessary setup for transcoding.

[hyenadog]

hi,

I came across the playwma plugin/Mplayer (like Alien BBC) and it works just fine, i have been playing around with the settings (squeeze server advanced) as there was quite a bit of sound quality loss in vanilla install, just leaving PCM and disabling the rest seems to give better quality, though strangely not as good as the original wma played on my PC (im runing a debian virtual box where SBS server is installed) so they are both using the same speakers etc though one is routing through virtual box (like softsqueeze)

if you have tried wma plug what are your feelings on the quality compared to the original wma ?? - am i right in thinking that there should be no transcoding loss to PCM anyway as itsjust uncompressing ??

anyway i have a solution at the moment which is great

thx for the reply

[bpa]

I'm not sure what you mean by "just leaving PCM and disabling the rest seems to give better quality" - if you are playing WMA->Flac then there should be no difference between WAV and Flac unless volume levels are not normalised when comparing. If you are playing WMA->MP3 then audio quality will be worse.

WMA is lossy which means depending on the decoder used you may get different results. If you are using mplayer for both straight to PC speaker or via SBS using Flac stream and not via MP3 - then audio quality can depend on your audio subsystem (e.g. ALSA, OSS, Pulse) and its mixer settings. You need to make sure everything is normalised before you can do comparisons.