Help getting started, please?

[shoboat90]

I’m new to the forum and very new to Firefly. So, I have a few questions that I hope you all could help me out with.

1. First….I’ve always used iTunes with my Soundbridge with much success, however I’m very curious/anxious to be able to run Firefly as a service on my PC or on an NAS so I don’t have to have iTunes running….can this be done?
2. Second….I really don’t understand how Firefly works and why there is so much talk about Firefly and iTunes working together? I understand them to be two different things…do you need both?
3. I went to the ‘stable’ download section of this page, and I can even figure out what to download to get started?

thanks in advance for your help
jim

[rpedde]

@shoboat90 wrote:

1. First….I’ve always used iTunes with my Soundbridge with much success, however I’m very curious/anxious to be able to run Firefly as a service on my PC or on an NAS so I don’t have to have iTunes running….can this be done?

Yes. With the pc it’s easy. First, go to the apple site and download and install Bonjour for Windows, then go to the nightly page, download the windows EXE version and run it. It should do everything necessary to be visible from the soundbridge.

2. Second….I really don’t understand how Firefly works and why there is so much talk about Firefly and iTunes working together? I understand them to be two different things…do you need both?

There are two versions of the Soundbride. One works with iTunes (in which case, you could just use iTunes as a server, assuming you had a windows or mac machine on all the time), the other (the Pinnacle-branded ones) can’t see iTunes. For those, one has to use a different server. One could use SlimServer, or a uPnP server like Twonky, or Firefly.

I like firefly because it’s open source, and I’m familiar enough with it that I can make it work the way I want it to. I also think it’s faster than most of the other servers.

3. I went to the ‘stable’ download section of this page, and I can even figure out what to download to get started?

Start out with the windows binary on the nightly page. Once you’ve played with it a bit, you might have a better idea about what it is, what it does, and what questions you have going forward.

— Rno

[shoboat90]

Alright….I’m making some progress.

I installed the Firefly for Windows and I actually saw the Firefly Media Server on my Soundbridge. However, everything that is in my music folder was not available on the Soundbridge? How do I fix this?

Then….I encountered the following:
Firefly Service has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

This keeps happening after I start the service?

So, once I have the service running….then I’m good to go, I guess? I still don’t get how iTunes figures into this then?

thanks
jim

[rpedde]

@shoboat90 wrote:

I installed the Firefly for Windows and I actually saw the Firefly Media Server on my Soundbridge. However, everything that is in my music folder was not available on the Soundbridge? How do I fix this?

It takes it a while to add all the songs to the database, so you might see only a subset of the songs you actually have. Also, only .mp3 and .m4a files get indexed by default. If you have wma, you have to edit the configuration so that it indexes wma file.

But that’s going to be problematic because of…

Then….I encountered the following:
Firefly Service has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Did you edit the config file? If the config file is borked, then it won’t start. You can look at the log file (using the log tab on the tray applet) to see what the logfile says. Hopefully (*crosses fingers*) it says something helpful.

If not, go to a dos prompt and do:

c:>cd program filesfirefly media server

c:program filesfirefly media server>firefly -d9 -f

It will spew out a bunch of junk. At some point it will crash. the last screenful of debug messages would be helpful to figuring out what’s up. (probably a song it doesn’t like).

So, once I have the service running….then I’m good to go, I guess? I still don’t get how iTunes figures into this then?

Yeah, assuming the service starts running — but we have to get there, first. 🙂

— Ron

[shoboat90]

All my files are .mp3, so perhaps it crashed before the scan was complete? Anyway, I never touched the config file…..this is what the log says from this morning when I started it up;

Log file: firefly.log

2006-07-25 : Starting with debuglevel 0
2006-07-25 : Starting rendezvous daemon
2006-07-25 : Can’t get db version. New database?
2006-07-25 : Initializing database
2006-07-25 : Starting web server from c:program filesfirefly media serveradmin-root on port 9999
2006-07-25 : Registering rendezvous names
2006-07-25 : Scanned 4133 songs in 31 seconds
2006-07-25 : Rescanning database

Anything jump out at you?

thanks so much for the help

jim

[rpedde]

@shoboat90 wrote:

All my files are .mp3, so perhaps it crashed before the scan was complete? Anyway, I never touched the config file…..this is what the log says from this morning when I started it up;

Log file: firefly.log

2006-07-25 : Starting with debuglevel 0
2006-07-25 : Starting rendezvous daemon
2006-07-25 : Can’t get db version. New database?
2006-07-25 : Initializing database
2006-07-25 : Starting web server from c:program filesfirefly media serveradmin-root on port 9999
2006-07-25 : Registering rendezvous names
2006-07-25 : Scanned 4133 songs in 31 seconds
2006-07-25 : Rescanning database

Anything jump out at you?

That is an older version of firefly. Try the one at http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org, and see where that gets you.

If it still crashes like that, then open “c:program filesfirefly media servermt-daapd.conf” with notepad. In the [general] section, add a line that says “loglevel = 9”. Save the config file, and restart the server.

You should get a whole lot more info in the log file.

— Ron

[shoboat90]

Well, I installed the version from the nightlies section and it still crashed. I did update the config file as you said….here is the latest log report I got;

Log file: firefly.log

2006-07-25 09:14:20 (a1832be5): Starting with debuglevel 0
2006-07-25 09:14:20 (a1832be5): Starting rendezvous daemon
2006-07-25 09:14:20 (a1832be5): Initializing database
2006-07-25 09:14:26 (a1832be5): Starting web server from C:Program FilesFirefly Media Serveradmin-root on port 9999
2006-07-25 09:14:31 (a1832be5): Registering rendezvous names
2006-07-25 09:14:31 (a1832be5): Serving 3316 songs. Startup complete in 11 seconds
2006-07-25 09:14:31 (a1832be5): Rescanning database

Things were a bit different this time.
1. The log file says only 3316 songs, the directory it is looking at has over 10,000?
2. It seemed to be fine until I started up the Soundbridge. The Soundbridge saw the Firefly media server, then it crashed again?

Any thoughts?

thanks
jim

[rpedde]

@shoboat90 wrote:

Well, I installed the version from the nightlies section and it still crashed. I did update the config file as you said….here is the latest log report I got;

Ooops… Sorry. That should have been “debuglevel”, not loglevel.

1. The log file says only 3316 songs, the directory it is looking at has over 10,000?

Yeah. It scans 3316 songs okay, and the 3317th one crashes it. By increasing the log level we’ll see what the song is that is crashing it.

2. It seemed to be fine until I started up the Soundbridge. The Soundbridge saw the Firefly media server, then it crashed again?

Probably just coincidence — just about the time that the sb connects, the server hits that bad file again.

[shoboat90]

So I corrected the config file with the “debuglevel” and this is the latest log file upon starting the service;

Log file: firefly.log

2006-07-25 10:52:05 (a1832be5): Starting with debuglevel 0
2006-07-25 10:52:05 (a1832be5): Starting rendezvous daemon
2006-07-25 10:52:06 (a1832be5): Initializing database
2006-07-25 10:52:30 (a1832be5): Starting web server from C:Program FilesFirefly Media Serveradmin-root on port 9999
2006-07-25 10:52:31 (a1832be5): Registering rendezvous names
2006-07-25 10:52:31 (a1832be5): Serving 4131 songs. Startup complete in 26 seconds
2006-07-25 10:52:31 (a1832be5): Rescanning database

then it crashed.

thanks
jim

Should we take this offline? My email address is

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