Support for SliMP3 and Squeezebox players (Exstreamer too) ?

[SteveK]

I'm have only 1 Squeezebox running with the last release of the 5.x (5.9?) slimserver. Release 6 crashes alot on my PC, so I've held off upgrading.

I'd be happy to try out anything you have. I'd like to be able to select and play my existing playlists and possibly select a speciific album from my library to play. Otherwise, I don't need alot of features.

Thanks for the quick response.

Steve

[SteveK]

Bump

[CouchPotatoe]

I haven't moved forward with this idea currently.

There were one or two questions I had and I unfortunately I couldn't get the info I needed - things seem pretty quiet on the XLobby development side at the moment and TBH I have been focussing elsewhere. I know Steven has a few other projects to sort and perhaps when he returns to XLobby I might be able to get this working.

There is a far better way to do this than simply 'mirroring, a WinAMP player but it needs some form of control messages from XL and some form of event/timeline feedback from the player. The xAP whole house audio schema is good for this but it needs XL co-operation.

If my current setup doesn't pan out I might return to XLobby and see what I can do...

K

[edbag4]

I would like to throw in my vote for slimserver operation with Xlobby!

[edbag4]

I thought I would check on this thread. According to the Slim Devices forum, the slimserver software is releatively easy to integrate with, supposedly the "Hooks" (?) are in place for someone to control it with their software. How about it Steven, any interest in this.

Thanks,
Ed

[hjackson]

Bump. I am hearing good things about the SqueezeBox 2 so I am interested too.

hjackson

[rbziggy]

Does anyone know if Slimserver control can now be effectively done using the latest XL xAP plugin to integrate to the xAP slimserver connector?

I guess it would take a bit of setup to define xAP messages in the XL plugin?

[CouchPotatoe]

SlimServer is fully integrated with xAP with many different features including full event reporting as music is played (eg track changes, artist/album info , durations etc) and also reports all infra red received codes which is useful for controlling other HA equipment as well. Full transport control is also provided for adding tracks and obviously play/stop/FF/rew and volume etc. This supports multiple players and so is truly multi room. There is even a message display feature allowing you to display information on any connected player screens for varying durations, and this is queue managed, across multiple players with a priority based override such that you can display less important info (eg temperature or news) but should a more important message need displaying eg Caller ID then it will overwrite the display (whilst suspending the previous message back in the queue).

From XLobby if you create the xAP messages then xAP Slimserver will react but as you say you have to create them and as XLobby doesn't have a 'script' engine built in then it is awkward to populate the messages with variable data. In order to implement music playback via a Slim player we need to get the music transport and song information from XLobby into xAP messages and it's this part we need help from Steven. Fortunately the Slim connector does already provide realtime feedback of progress and this would (may) have to be picked up back into XLobby. The player itself handles playlists.

One great aspect of supporting a xAP attached mp3 player is that is an abstraction of the hardware. You just drive the xAP device and it takes care of whatever player is attached so you get immediate support for several playback devices and others can be added external to XL relatively easily. You can theoretically replace a Squeezebox with an Exstreamer and it just works without change. We have several already including SliMP3, Squeezebox, Barix Exstreamer, WinAMP, TelCanto, Roku and some initial work in UPnP / Audio Request / Escient too. Any player that can somehow be controlled is a suitable candidate for xAPping.

Kevin

[mzemina]

The name of the third generation product is "Squeezebox Network Music Player" and you can find more info here.

Mike