Announce : BBC Sounds Plugin

[florca]

... I am trying to keep the Joggler as close as possible to the birdslikewires release and it works with iPlayer plugin.

I guess I need to replicate iPlayer custom-convert but a hint would help.

This may break the "keep it close to standard" directive, but for many years I've used the original birdslikewires Joggler / Squeezeplay build (on internal flash) but with a copy of Squeezelite also loaded and running as a separate player (started within .xinitrc just before squeezeplay.sh). Squeezeplay itself uses the internal speaker but is configured via Choose Player to control the squeezelite instance, which outputs to a USB DAC - currently a Behringer UCA202 using "-o hw:CARD=CODEC,DEV=0" but previously a Topping DAC/Amp. You do need to configure an explict, unique MAC address via -m for the squeezelite instance (otherwise LMS gets confused). The original reason was to avoid transcoding AAC streams and content in a very low-powered LMS and poor wifi network, but I've kept the configuration even without those constraints as it works well, with the useful side effect of the touch interface sounds coming directly from the Joggler but the content coming from the main system.

Oh - and it works 100% fine with both BBC Sounds and iPlayer.

[photop1]

I just wanted to post a thank you for this. As for others, my Catch up feed went down today and this has saved me a deal of messing about

[Sb42]

Thank you for saving my sanity with this Plugin. Have I missed a step or does it not support the Squeezebox Radio?

[florca]

... Have I missed a step or does it not support the Squeezebox Radio?

Works fine for me - it sits under "My Apps" rather than "Radio" which may be your issue? You can promote it to the Home menu via a long push on the knob..

[timmoss501]

Firstly, a huge thanks from me.Llike many others I only discovered the BBC Sounds plugin following the problems with the Iplayer plugin. I wish I had known about it earlier as the two complement each other very well.

A couple of suggestions for features that I miss in the Sounds plugin are program descriptions and thumbnail images in program listings/schedule, the thumbnails are helpful for those with less than 20:20 vision. Is this data easily available via the api? As a matter of interest, is the Sounds api freely available? I'd be interested to take a look at it if it is.

I appreciate that with what looks like the scuppering of Iplayer's listen again you are likely to get loads of feature requests, so for me these are nice to haves. Incidentally, I find the Sounds plugin far more intuitive than the BBC's browser based version and far easier to navigate, so once again, many thanks for creating the plugin and making it available.

[expectingtofly]

A couple of suggestions for features that I miss in the Sounds plugin are program descriptions and thumbnail images in program listings/schedule, the thumbnails are helpful for those with less than 20:20 vision. Is this data easily available via the api?

The plugin is providing the images in all menus. It's up to the controller to show them. Material skin shows them, and they are shown on the radio/touch menus.
What are you using that is not showing them?

[Paul Webster]

If you want an immediate fix, comment out line 94 in the m4a.pm (this is untested on other players, but as the BBC Iplayer plugin doesn't set it, I guess it is ok)

	if ( my $atom = parseAtoms( 'moov', $dataref, $args ) ) {
					$props->{mp4a} =$atom->{'trak'}->{'mdia'}->{'minf'}->{'stbl'}->{'stsd'}->{'entries'}->{'mp4a'};
					$song->track->bitrate( $props->{bitrate}|| $props->{mp4a}->{'esds'}->{'avgbitrate'} );
				#	$song->track->samplerate( $props->{'samplingRate'}|| $props->{mp4a}->{'samplerate'} );
					$song->track->channels( $props->{'channels'}|| $props->{mp4a}->{'channelcount'} );

Thanks - this worked.

Probably needs bpa/Michael/Philippe/Ralphy/Roobarb input to work out a solution that allows the plugin to continue to provide the correct data but for LMS to determine that transcode is needed because player does not support the source sample rate.

I suspect that this is already possible in Squeezelite so maybe Jive needs same capability or perhaps LMS could assume everything supports only 44.1 unless told otherwise (which could be via Audio config page for player in LMS) ... or player tells LMS "unsupported sample rate" when it fails and LMS tries a different one via transcode (which would result in a delay and possibly intermediate error messages).

[NMarshall]

I'd like to add my huge thanks for this new plugin, which really does fill in some of the BBC gaps.

I can't pretend to be a fan of Sounds. iPlayer is perfect - far and away the best thing the BBC ever created - but this plugin will give me immense pleasure by providing access to the long list of audiobooks alone.

As always, we listeners enjoy the fruits of other people's hard labour.

And there has never been a time when having access to high quality radio output from around the world was so important to get us through these difficult days.

Thanks!

[Sb42]

Works fine for me - it sits under "My Apps" rather than "Radio" which may be your issue? You can promote it to the Home menu via a long push on the knob..

Hmm...I'm seeing an entry in My Apps for BBC which is a monochrome BBC logo, it seems to only provide Live Channels. On my Squeezebox Classics I get a entry of BBC Sounds and sub-menu items for Search etc.

Still can't find it on the Radio.

[expectingtofly]

Hmm...I'm seeing an entry in My Apps for BBC which is a monochrome BBC logo, it seems to only provide Live Channels. On my Squeezebox Classics I get a entry of BBC Sounds and sub-menu items for Search etc.

Still can't find it on the Radio.

Have you connected your radio to your local server? It sounds like it is connected to mysqueezebox.com