Linux music server

quote:

Originally posted by Graham Russell:
Has anyone built a Linux music server running something like MPD?

I'm wondering whether Linux is a better platform than Windows....

Thanks
Graham

I have a home build Linux fileserver based on Ubuntu 9.10 used as a NAS.

Currently I use a PopcornHour (which has an embedded Linux OS) with mpd as my streamer.
This works really great, the only drawback at the moment is that mpd on the PopcornHour doesn't do 24 bit audio files.
This is due to the lack of a conversion of regular 24-audio files to packed 24-bit LPCM, as in DVD-audio. And the processor in the PopcornHour expects 24-bit audio to be offered as packed 24-bit LPCM.

It is possible to play 24-bit HiRes audio using the inbuild Mono-player of the PopcornHour, but that doesn't have the possibilities of mpd and not such a nice interface.

If you want to use an ordinary Linux-box as a music server that no problem since mpd is available for must linux distributions and there a enough fine soundcards that have Linux drivers available.

The only reason I am not using my Linux Box as music server is because I don't want it in my listening room, with all the drives and cooling fans. This is why I use the PopcornHour as streamer, which is connected over ethernet and NFS to my Linux-file box which just acts as a NAS-fileserver in my network.

-
aleg

quote:

I'm wondering whether Linux is a better platform than Windows....

With Windows Media Player it is easy to stream WMA (lossless) and difficult to use flac. With Linux (Mediatomb) the opposite applies. I have tried both. Sound wise I did not notice any difference.

Personally I think that it is more important to have a dedicated server, preferably not in the same room as the HiFi - to avoid noise from fans etc.

I am not a fan of WMA particularly the way it rips files, and stores (or fails to store) the track names. Dbpoweramp is very much better.

There are many uPnP servers foobar and Twonky quite often get mentioned.

I am building a silent PC (when the parts arrive through the snow drifts) and have a choice of OS. The system will connect direct to the dac.

I might event build it dual booting so I can have both Windows and Linux capabilities.

There is FreeNAS which would be a one stop solution. It includes UPnP

I've been playing with Vortexbox recently, a dedicated Linux music server and autoripper distribution based on Red Hat.

http://vortexbox.org/

Pete

quote:

Originally posted by smileypete:
I've been playing with Vortexbox recently, a dedicated Linux music server and autoripper distribution based on Red Hat.

http://vortexbox.org/

Pete

Hi Pete,

Thank you for sharing this distro I missed!
So cool it does exist; downloading and testing right now!

Regards,
HF

Works like a charm only two things I need to resolve:
1. I have to figure out how the ripper informs me about an unreadable and unrecoverable CD thanks to scratches on some of my older CD's
2. I want it ripped to WAV and not let it encode at all; did that, but now newly ripped CD's don't show up in Squeezebox Server even after a total rescan (Yes: I changed the musicfolder to the WAV-one).
When I first installed the OS it ripped to Flac and showed everyting new immediately in SBS...

Any thoughts before I use up the rest of this snowy sunday afternoon to solve this?

quote:

Originally posted by HighFid3lity:
Works like a charm only two things I need to resolve:
1. I have to figure out how the ripper informs me about an unreadable and unrecoverable CD thanks to scratches on some of my older CD's
2. I want it ripped to WAV and not let it encode at all; did that, but now newly ripped CD's don't show up in Squeezebox Server even after a total rescan (Yes: I changed the musicfolder to the WAV-one).
When I first installed the OS it ripped to Flac and showed everyting new immediately in SBS...

Any thoughts before I use up the rest of this snowy sunday afternoon to solve this?

OK, read the VortexBox Forum and saw no info is connected to the WAV's.
I'll settle for Flac with highest quality-setting than and see how I get them to my iPod without degrading them to MP3's...

And I think I saw a switch in the config-file for ending the rip if problems arise like no database-entries and rip-problems

Vortexbox is still a bit rough in places - the ripping engine is Ripit which has a config file

http://linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/chroot/etc/ripit/config

You can convert the FLAC files to Apple Lossless on the Vortexbox Mirroring page, there was a bug in the original script that caused the conversion to abort if there was no cover art in the folder containing the album FLACs, this may have been sorted now. I couldn't get iTunes to play the files from a shared library although it could see them over DAAP. They did play if I dragged them into iTunes directly. TBH I use the Vortexbox for background music in the kitchen mainly, FLAC on a Squeezebox radio, so I didn't spend too long working with it.

Overall it works pretty well for me, I can listen to music all over the house, but the CD5x destroys my Apple TV/DacMagic in the foot tapping & enjoyment stakes

Pete

PS If you have the right iPod you can run Rockbox opensource firmware and play FLAC's natively. Works for me...

http://www.rockbox.org/

quote:

Originally posted by smileypete:
Vortexbox is still a bit rough in places - the ripping engine is Ripit which has a config file

http://linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/chroot/etc/ripit/config

You can convert the FLAC files to Apple Lossless on the Vortexbox Mirroring page, there was a bug in the original script that caused the conversion to abort if there was no cover art in the folder containing the album FLACs, this may have been sorted now. I couldn't get iTunes to play the files from a shared library although it could see them over DAAP. They did play if I dragged them into iTunes directly. TBH I use the Vortexbox for background music in the kitchen mainly, FLAC on a Squeezebox radio, so I didn't spend too long working with it.

Overall it works pretty well for me, I can listen to music all over the house, but the CD5x destroys my Apple TV/DacMagic in the foot tapping & enjoyment stakes

Pete

PS If you have the right iPod you can run Rockbox opensource firmware and play FLAC's natively. Works for me...

http://www.rockbox.org/

Unfortunately for me I have an iPod Classic 120GB which is a 6th Gen and unsupported by Rockbox.
And unfortunately I sold my CD5x, but I cannot A/B and so think my Logitech Duet rocks enough right now.

I will check that Apple Lossless when I have some hardware I'm satisfied with.

quote:

I'm wondering whether Linux is a better platform than Windows....

Of course it is ... if you want to run a serious server application then you wouldn't want to use Windoze.

To be honest never built a music server, but we use around 1000 servers of which 997 are Linux and 3 are Windoews - we only have problems with three of the servers.

Ideally I like somebody to buold a music server without an underlying operating system, but I guess this is difficult to do for modern programmers.

On linux you can install easily a DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol) server.
Then all your DAAP capable clients will have available all your music stored in the server (usually software clients - i dont know for example if hdx support such a thing)
Installation is very simple. For example on Fedora 12:
yum install mt-daapd

edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf (just edit the path to the folder that contains your music)

start the service (from command line or gui)

If firewall is enabled,release the firewall TCP port 3689(from command line or gui)

quote:

A DAAP server is a specialized HTTP server, which performs two functions. It sends a list of songs and it streams requested songs to clients. There are also provisions to notify the client of changes to the server. Requests are sent to the server by the client in form of URLs and are responded to with data in application/x-dmap-tagged mime-type, which can be converted to XML by the client. iTunes uses the ZeroConf (also known as Bonjour) service to announce and discover DAAP shares on a local subnet. The DAAP service utilizes TCP port 3689 by default.

I've now got MPD running under OpenSUSE. It took a bit of fiddling getting to play bit perfect via the digital output of the Juli@ card. Initial impressions are very good. As it's a proper client/server model it's easy to configure remote clients to play music. Most Windows applications either have crude http remote support or require external viewing via remote desktop or VNC. These just add to network load and create additional workload on the music server.

Personally I need to run the server headless and rely on remote connectivity.

I am hoping to have a Naim DAC here very soon to give this set up a real work out

My PC is configured dual boot, so it's dead easy to run stripped down XP or optimised SUSE.

This is very techie stuff but shows just how much performance can be squeezed out of optimised PC sources.

I am testing both set ups with wav files.