I think we are almost ready to release VortexBox Player for general use. I added a GUI so you can configure VortexBox player from the Web GUI. You can now link it to any ALSA device.
To install or update.
yum clean all
yum update
setup-vb-player
This works as an install or upgrade. Now you can set up your VortexBox player in the GUI.
Hi Andrew,
System: Intel Atom 330 mini-itx with audio out through the analogue onboard sound to my stereo, tested with squeezebox duet controller & ipeng on an iphone.
Listening to my local music library - Vortexbox Player works with my mp3 collection with no problems.
Listening to internet radio - Vortexbox player works with my local and BBC internet radio stations with no problems.
Listening to Napster - Vortexbox player works with Napster with no problems (the ability to edit the player MAC from the web interface is a great addition).
Question - I presume that if I ever need to reinstall Vortexbox my previous actions of installing mplayer and the playWMA plugin will be required for Napster to work and have not rolled into the Vortexbox Player install routine?
Switching between any of the above - no problems.
I would say that for my needs, this is a complete success and will now allow me to move one of my squeezebox receivers to another room - result!
Question - I presume that if I ever need to reinstall Vortexbox my previous actions of installing mplayer and the playWMA plugin will be required for Napster to work and have not rolled into the Vortexbox Player install routine?
The next feature we are adding is a VortexBox plug-in manager. You will be able to install things like mplayer from the GUI.
Can you tell me more about the playwma plugin? Maybe with a link.
'The PlayWMA plugin is designed to allow you to listen to WMA streams on players that do not support WMA. It also adds the ability to listen to many other radio streams.'
The playWMA plugin can be added via this repositry:
http://bpaplugins.googlecode.c.....k/repo.xml
Hope this helps.
Just upgraded the player. Two issues.
[*]The first ten seconds (approx) of playback on each song is choppy. After that it's fine for the rest of the song.[*]Before upgrading, I had used some config files you provided in another post to split my sound card up into four outputs (green,black,gray, pink) Worked perfectly. Doesn't appear the new player supports this, unless I am missing something. I'd really like to have this functionality back. I am using this in a whole house audio setup that supports multiple inputs and I want to have multiple players to drive them.
Not sure how to troubleshoot further. Is there a way to switch back to the squeezeslave players temporarily while we sort this out?
Not sure why your getting the choppiness. I do get 1 second or so of choppiness sometimes but only on the first song I play after a reboot.
If you wan to use the split ALSA configuration just enter "green" for the Audio Device to play out the green jack etc.
OK. So in the GUI I have created four players. Setting the audio devices to green, black, gray an pink. So I now see all four players available in the SBS screen. This appears to work. Thanks for that. Each can play simultaniously and feed my audio rack.
I still have the choppiness problem and now I have no volume control fom within the SBS. It plays at max volume which unfortunately is creating a clipping problem.
Edit to add: I can however use the alsamixer to reduce the volume, so I can work around this problem, but I suspect others would expect to control the volume from the SBS GUI.
I see that there are mpd.conf files generated in the vortexbox-player directory. In my case I have four of them. mpd0.conf, mpd1.conf, etc.
These appear to be generated automatically. I'm wondering if I edit them manually, will changes be overwritten? I wanted to see if adjusting the audio_buffer_size or buffer_before_play options might help the choppy playback.
If I do edit these config files, do I have to restart the whole thing to pick up the changes?
smithkt said:
I see that there are mpd.conf files generated in the vortexbox-player directory. In my case I have four of them. mpd0.conf, mpd1.conf, etc.
These appear to be generated automatically. I'm wondering if I edit them manually, will changes be overwritten? I wanted to see if adjusting the audio_buffer_size or buffer_before_play options might help the choppy playback.
If I do edit these config files, do I have to restart the whole thing to pick up the changes?
Yes they do get overwritten but only when you hit submit on the VortexBox-player page. You can edit the files and do a vortexbox-player restart from command line. This will restart all the VortexBox players and different versions of mpd.
The buffers are set to 0 by default. I was thinking it might be a good idea to have some small buffers. If you test a few different size buffers and report what works best I can make your settings the default.
I'll continue experimenting when I get back home tonight. I'll let you know what I find.
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