Per Player audiodir in slimserver.conf

[elo]

My music library is set up like:
/volume/Music/FLAC/[artistname]/[albumtitle]/[songname]
/volume/Music/MP3/[artistname]/[albumtitle]/[songname]

/volume/Music/FLAC is where I want my LAN-connected SB2s to play from. I want my WAN-connected Softsqueeze and SB2s to play from the /volume/Music/MP3 dir.

Why? I encode both in FLAC for critical listening at home, but MP3-vbr for iPod. I have no problem pointing my iTunes at the smb://volume/Music/MP3 so it makes that part easy. But now I want to get some SB2s and Softsqueeze's to use the MP3vbrs rather then doing the LAME transcode of the FLACs to XXXmb/s-CBR. The idea being, I can get better audio quality/mb-per-sec with VBR and save the CPU overhead of the transcode.

Can this be done? I was hopeing I could edit the /etc/slimserver.conf file for each player to have different audiodir... but don't see a player specific entry for this var only one for everything... was just gonna try it but thought I'd ask...

e9:da:e2:4d:f4:9f-audiodir = /volume/Music/FLAC
e9:da:e2:4a:23:12-audiodir = /volume/Music/MP3

Or am I on the wrong path to achieving this?

[peter]

Per Player audiodir in slimserver.conf

elo wrote:
> My music library is set up like:
> /volume/Music/FLAC/[artistname]/[albumtitle]/[songname]
> /volume/Music/MP3/[artistname]/[albumtitle]/[songname]
>
> /volume/Music/FLAC is where I want my LAN-connected SB2s to play from.
> I want my WAN-connected Softsqueeze and SB2s to play from the
> /volume/Music/MP3 dir.
>
> Why? I encode both in FLAC for critical listening at home, but MP3-vbr
> for iPod. I have no problem pointing my iTunes at the
> smb://volume/Music/MP3 so it makes that part easy. But now I want to
> get some SB2s and Softsqueeze's to use the MP3vbrs rather then doing
> the LAME transcode of the FLACs to XXXmb/s-CBR. The idea being, I can
> get better audio quality/mb-per-sec with VBR and save the CPU overhead
> of the transcode.
>
> Can this be done? I was hopeing I could edit the /etc/slimserver.conf
> file for each player to have different audiodir... but don't see a
> player specific entry for this var only one for everything... was just
> gonna try it but thought I'd ask...
>
> e9:da:e2:4d:f4:9f-audiodir = /volume/Music/FLAC
> e9:da:e2:4a:23:12-audiodir = /volume/Music/MP3
>
> Or am I on the wrong path to achieving this?
>
>
>

Maybe you could run two instances of the slimserver (on the same
physical machine).
One for your MP3's and one for your FLAC's...

I'm not sure if the architecture allows this...

Regards,
Peter

[elo]

Hmm, thats a good idea.. I've seen various threads about doing that.. Not sure if the added complexity is worth it.

[JJZolx]

I encode both in FLAC for critical listening at home, but MP3-vbr for iPod. I have no problem pointing my iTunes at the smb://volume/Music/MP3 so it makes that part easy. But now I want to get some SB2s and Softsqueeze's to use the MP3vbrs rather then doing the LAME transcode of the FLACs to XXXmb/s-CBR. The idea being, I can get better audio quality/mb-per-sec with VBR and save the CPU overhead of the transcode.

There's no way to do this other than to run two instances of SlimServer.

Is the system unable to handle the transcoding? There's not a lot to be gained in keeping the CPU utilization under 2% rather than, say, 12%.

SlimServer transcodes to ABR (average bit-rate) rather than CBR. ABR is a type of variable bitrate encoding where the overall (average) rate is kept at a set point. The idea is that this is a better choice than VBR when you may need to stay within the confines of a given connection's bandwidth. Quality will tend to be better than CBR, but probably not quite what VBR is capable of. The problem with VBR is that you can only set a fairly general bitrate range, which might go higher than the available bandwidth rate and be more likely to result in dropouts.

[elo]

SlimServer transcodes to ABR (average bit-rate) rather than CBR.

Thanks for the info, Jim. ABR would be good enough for me.

...But I'm a bit confused. When you navigate the menus on the SB when playing a LAME transcoded FLAC song, going in to the song info series, you get to the bit rate screen it says:

"Bitrate: 1160kb/s CBR (converted to 256kb/s CBR)"

Thats where I got the CBR from... Was this true in the past and now it uses ABR... b/c I am running SS6.1.1, so maybe it changed for 6.2? Haven't upgraded because I haven't needed to. Or maybe its a display error?

[JJZolx]

Thanks for the info, Jim. ABR would be good enough for me.

...But I'm a bit confused. When you navigate the menus on the SB when playing a LAME transcoded FLAC song, going in to the song info series, you get to the bit rate screen it says:

"Bitrate: 1160kb/s CBR (converted to 256kb/s CBR)"

Thats where I got the CBR from... Was this true in the past and now it uses ABR... b/c I am running SS6.1.1, so maybe it changed for 6.2? Haven't upgraded because I haven't needed to. Or maybe its a display error?

Yes, it used to be CBR. Probably changed in 6.0.x or 6.1.

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=15883

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2006

[elo]

Wow, Awesome. Thanks Jim.