Home music server, Linux software recommendations

[bobajobrob]

I have an old PIII 700Mhz server with a 250GB disk that I use for playing music, amongst other things. The server has a sound blaster card that is connected to the amp in my living room. I currently use beep-media-player over remote X, but I'm sick of the lag.

I have tried mpd, but I found the gmpc client very basic and lacking features.

I have also tried kalliope music server, but that was a bit of a disaster. After I got it working, I soon got tired of the web interface.

Have also tried vnc, which was pretty good, but it's borked at the moment now working again.

Any recommendations?

Thanks.

Edit: am using mpd and gmpc again. gmpc seems to have improved a lot since I last tried it. It has some good features, I like it.

[pcolbeck]

I am looking at doing something similar and currently SquuezeCenter is looking like the way I am going to go.

[thing1]

We've been using slimserver (now Squeeze Center) for a couple years and am quite pleased with it. If you're happy to control via web-browser it should do the job right out of the box. The new version 7 has a much slicker web UI too.

You can connect multiple clients, and control them all through the web interface. Serves me for listening to music at work too (only downside being, it does mean any of my illustrious colleagues who happen to stumble across the server port can control what's playing the bedroom back home. Only once woken up at 3am when someone hit play 'by mistake' . Ought  to plug that hole...)

Nice thing with squeeze center is it groks my whole-album-per-flac-file library, and also can transcode to mp3 before streaming out over the piece-of-string connection to work.

Couple of downsides:
- Whilst I love the hardware SqueezeBox players, I never really liked SoftSqueeze much. It's impressive bit of java, but tends to crash or loose the server too often, esp. running under Linux.
- Whilst you can point any http streaming mp3 player at slimserver [I variously use Banshee, Rhythm box, amoroK, maybe even iTunes on my MacBook] it can be a bit fiddly, and you loose some of the nice features like synchronized playing and get an annoying 10+ sec lag in controls (e.g. select different song) to take effect.
- slimdevices (now Logitech company) are sitting on the fence over DAAP server support. If they implemented it, their server would integrate with many other SW clients much nicer as DAAP support seems to be becoming pretty pervasive.

fwiw Yesterday I stumbled across Elisa (http://elisa.fluendo.com/). I don't think it is particularly relevant for your needs, I had to mention it as its now running on my HTPC and looks lovely even though very early in development.... I just wish it would hook up to slimserver (hence my DAAP whinge).

[Zipperhead]

Couple of downsides:
- Whilst I love the hardware SqueezeBox players, I never really liked SoftSqueeze much. It's impressive bit of java, but tends to crash or loose the server too often, esp. running under Linux.

I find that SoftSqueeze tends to crash slimserver which is annoying. I'm going to upgrade to version 7 of slimserver next week (to support my new remote), and it would be nice if it made it a little more robust to SoftSqueeze.

[bobajobrob]

Am I right in thinking that slimserver/Squeeze Center is for streaming only, or can it play music on the server? Is it controlled by a web interface only, or is there a "proper" client?

[Cyclops]

There are various plug-ins for Squeezecentre that let you play music on various devices including the server.

See here

[bobajobrob]

So am I right in thinking that I could run one of these players to output music on the server, then use another (web?) interface to control playback remotely? I may be confused, but it looks like all the players play music streamed from the slimserver. In which case, streaming music to a player on the same machine seems a bit unnecessary.

[pcolbeck]

A server serves data to a client over a network.Doesn't matter if the client happens to be on the same physical machine logically it still goes over a network. In the case of music we call this streaming media. What you are trying to do is not really a server but a remotely controlled jukebox. That's a different kettle of fish.

[bobajobrob]

What you are trying to do is not really a server but a remotely controlled jukebox.

Bingo! You're right though, I think the "server" bit in the thread title is probably misleading.

[pcolbeck]

It's also why most of the software your looking at doesn't quite do what you want because most people want a multi room streaming system.

[bobajobrob]

I only have one stereo so that's not much use to me. However, mpd and gmpc does exactly what I want, so I think I'll stick with that Actually, I would like it to support internet radio as well.