A standalone Java client: FireflyClient

[RigasW]

Hi Caribou,

thanks again for that great player. My wife and I had so much fun creating Xmas-playlists the other night!

Merry xmas and a happy new year!

RigasW

[Anonymous]

@keror0 wrote:

Glad to see development resume after the long holiday, don’t forgot to fix the UTF songs name doesn’t display correctly in window title bug! 😀

@keror0 wrote:

Done. Hopefully I sent the correct file to you.

Good news ! Thanks for having sent your library file. After some quick test (and having installed the “East asian language pack” for window) I reproduced the buggy behaviour and I found a simple workaround which will be part of the next release. Next release is not ready at this time and I don’t know when it’ll be as I do not have much spare time (I’ll soon become dad !) Most new features are almost fully implemented (Genre panel, library autoloading, search by criteria) but some are not completly finished (applet support).
@keror0 wrote:

One quick question, am I correct that Album Art must be embedded inside every mp3 songs in order to get FireflyClient display it during playback? Just a folder.jpg or cover.jpg copy to the same folder with the songs doesn’t works?

You’re right. The album art must be embedded in each song to be displayed in Firefly Client. I think there is a support in firefly media server to dynamically embed album art from a jpeg file located in the song directory when song is served. The name of the art file is configurable in mt-daapd.conf file with the property “art_filename”. This is an experimental support and I’ve not tested it. It might be worth to give a try if you are not able to embed artowrk in each file.
–caribou

[Anonymous]

@RigasW wrote:

Hi Caribou,
thanks again for that great player. My wife and I had so much fun creating Xmas-playlists the other night!
Merry xmas and a happy new year!
RigasW

Thanks for your support RigasW,
…and Merry christmas to everyone…
I thought I could deliver 0.8b version for Christmas but it seems difficult,…sorry !
–caribou

[Anonymous]

I installed this excellent app yesterday and got it working perfectly on my laptop connected wirelessly on the LAN side of my router.

Today, I thought I would venture out and see how it would perform connected via a wireless access point in a cafe or two.

I connected at 54 Mbps and managed to load in my Firefly library, although it did take a couple of minutes compared with 10-20 seconds when running on my LAN. I have about 7500 songs in the library, mainly 320 mp3 files.

So far so good and at least this seemed to prove that the relevant port was correctly opened up.

However, when I selected a song to play, it took 2-3 minutes (or more) before anything happened (the program became non-responsive so it was doing something) and then eventually the track started to play but in fits and starts as if there was insufficient bandwidth. I tried a few different songs, including some 192 mp3 files, but the result was the same every time.

I had thought (hoped) that 54 Mbps would have been ample bandwidth to stream 320 mp3 files so is there another reason why my files aren’t streaming smoothly?

I’ve stuck with the Firefly port 9999 but would it be an idea to select a different one? If so, which one? If I select this new port in Firefly Media Server, is the port automatically opened so that I don’t need to do anything different in Firefly Client? Sorry, but my knowledge of routers, port forwarding, etc is close to nil so apologies if I’ve missed something obvious!

Any other settings I need to be aware of and/or change?

[EVILRipper]

54mbps is sufficient. But that isn’t the speed of your internet connection when streaming to remote. It’s the speed from within your local network.
320kbit/8 equals 40kb/s. That is the actual speed you need to flawlessly stream a 320kbit mp3.
Try visiting speedtest.net or something similar if you don’t know your upload speed from home.

Though the 2-3 minutes to play a song worries me. How could a single request take so long, and eventually work. I’d more likely say your home firefly could not be reached. But it eventually worked, so that’s clearly not the case.

I don’t really know how fireflyclient works. If you have a real slow internet connection at home, maybe the 2-3 minutes before hearing anything was the program trying to fill a couple of buffers. And after that, the bandwidth stayed insufficient so you hear gaps all the time.
That might be a possible explanation.

Also, as you’re saying you know nothing about port forwarding, how did you get it to work from remote in the first place?
Routers block any incoming connections from the outside world, unless you forward a certain port to a certain PC in the local network.
So you must have correctly forwarded the port on your router to the PC with firefly. Else it wouldn’t work in the first place from outside your local network.

[Anonymous]

Hi

My upload speed from home tends to be around 1/3rd of a gig (max half a gig).

I’m definitely reaching Firefly or else I wouldn’t have been able to retrieve the database.

Installing Bonjour/Firefly at home automatically opens port 9999. I retrieved the external IP address of my BT Home Hub from the set-up screens and then it’s just a case of entering this address and port 9999 when running the Firefly Client on my laptop. I surprised myself that I got it to work on the LAN to be honest!

I don’t really understand the 2-3 minutes delay either, nor the extreme stuttering streaming once it starts to play, but I’m going to try a couple of other things – 1) change the port on my Firefly server installation (just in case something else that I don’t know about is also trying to use 9999) and 2) connect with my other router (Linksys WAP54G) as the BT Home Hub is pretty sluggish when connecting from ‘inside’ my firewall and you’ve provided a clue that it might be the weakest link in the chain when trying to stream to the outside world.

[Anonymous]

>Today, I thought I would venture out and see how it would perform connected via a wireless access point in a cafe or two.

So your problem was accessing from a Cafe? Did you run a download speed test from that location?

[EVILRipper]

Indeed. As rregent said, maybe the internet in the cafe was limited to a very low speed.
But I’m glad I might have provided a clue. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi

I didn’t test the download speed in Starbucks/Cafe Nero etc but I’ll do this in due course.

Meanwhile, I tested my connection speed at home – download approx 6.2 gig, upload approx 0.4 gig. Switching routers and ports didn’t make any significant difference to these measurements so I’ve gone back to the BT Home Hub and port 9999.

Firefly Client is super-fast on my wireless laptop when working on the LAN side but clearly it would be much more useful on the WAN side. I’ll experiment with file compressions to see if it makes any difference to streaming performance. I might need to consider a dual-library set-up with my current mixture of 320 mp3 and FLAC for home use, and maybe something like 128 mp3 for use when I’m out and about.

[Anonymous]

Hi every one,

Christmas day is pretty calm at work…. so it let me the time to finalize and deliver the new release of Firefly Client : FireflyClient : 0.8b
See: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212642
Main features are :
– Library autoloading
– Applet version (can be installed server-side)
– Genre panel
– Criteria search
– Player controls shortcuts (play, next, previous)
– one more language available : IT (thanks to Christian)
– bugs corrected

I hope it will suit your needs and demands and it is not too buggy !

Here is the detailed changelog below.

Changelog:

Version 0.8 b

- Added library autoloading option (activated by default if only one library exists or in applet mode)

- can be changed in the preferences dialog

- Added a splash screen on startup (Might be usefull in autoload mode when app takes time to contact the server)

- Added an optional "Genre" panel (activated by default, might need to reload the remote library)

- Search by criteria feature (all, genre, artist, album or title)

- Added shortcuts to control the player (play/pause, next and previous)

- Added an applet version of the application (allows server-side installation)

- fireflyclient-applet(.zip or .tar.gz) must be uncompressed in admin-root directory or server

- the URL to load the applet is then : http://server:port/applet/fireflyclient.html

- applet should work well with Firefox and IE if Java runtime plugin is installed

- This works because those two browser manage 'jnlp_href' param in <applet> tag

- For those that don't (Safari, Chrome), workaround can be found but jar file (FireflyClient.jar) must be served by

another web-server than the built-in Firefly Media Server web-server.

Indeed, as built-in FMS web server doesn't send HTTP header 'Content-Length',

classic java plugin behaviour (as opposed to JNLP behaviour) is unable to

cache the resource (jar file) which can be pretty inconvenient.

- Added IT translation file (thanks to Christian)

- Added a right-click menu on editable playlist songs to remove songs from it



- [FIXED BUG] Window title unicode support

- [FIXED BUG] Now manage EOFException when seeking too close to the end of track

- minor bug fixes

As usual, any support, any remark, bug report, feature request is welcome…

Merry christmas to all,

— caribou

[Author]

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