Multiple soundbridges accessing one or more mt-daapds

[rojbalc]

@richdunlop wrote:

I’ve got three Soundbridges running off a single Firefly instance running on a deunderclocked slug. No problems with 320kbps MP3 streaming concurrently.

There’s nothing special you need to do. Just buy the Soundbridges and hook them up to your network. I have two wireless and one wired.

Thanks for the advice. I’m not doing anything special like running additional servers off my NAS, I’ve not got any transcoding going (yet) either, so it will literally be 2x M1001s streaming music (mp3) off 1x Firefly on the MSS, both wireless. Sounds like I shouldn’t have any problems…

[S80_UK]

Just for fun (mainly because I can, but also to keep the wife happy 😉 ), I have set up my NSLU2 running several instances of Firefly (build 1511). In fact, today I have four instances running, each with its own settings and its own database.

Why? Well, there are three of us, so I have one instance serving for me, one for my wife, and one for my daughter, and one capable of serving anything. This way, my wife and daughter can find their music more easily without tripping over all mine.

How? Relatively painless. I created seven folders

All
Me
Wife
Daughter
Me and Wife
Me and Daughter
Wife and Daughter

Then I drop the artists and albums folders into the relevant one of these depending on who is to have access to that music. I set up four config files, each with its own port number, and each looking at the folders for the user for that instance of Firefly, and pointing to a unique database and log file. So for example, Firefly for my wife’s music looks at folders All, Wife, Me and Wife, Wife and Daughter. Firefly for my music looks at All, Me, Me and Wife, Me and Daughter. And so on. Then I just edited the start-up file S60mt-daapd to launch the four instances each with its own config file.

Start up takes only a little longer than before if there is nothing new to add or change in the databases.

And this is on a standard 266MHz NSLU2, transcoding FLAC to WAV for two SoundBridges.

Ron – Thanks again for such an amazing piece of software. To say I am well impressed is a major piece of understatement. It’s just brilliant!

[rpedde]

@S80_UK wrote:

All
Me
Wife
Daughter
Me and Wife
Me and Daughter
Wife and Daughter

Then I drop the artists and albums folders into the relevant one of these depending on who is to have access to that music. I set up four config files, each with its own port number, and each looking at the folders for the user for that instance of Firefly, and pointing to a unique database and log file. So for example, Firefly for my wife’s music looks at folders All, Wife, Me and Wife, Wife and Daughter. Firefly for my music looks at All, Me, Me and Wife, Me and Daughter. And so on. Then I just edited the start-up file S60mt-daapd to launch the four instances each with its own config file.

That’s a neat setup. The thing I’m driving for is to be able to do two things:

1. Logs by user name
2. Set base library to be a smart playlist
3. Let smart playlist use a smart playlist as a criteria

So I could make a playlist like:

1. My stuff = grouping includes “me”
2. Wifes stuff = grouping includes “wife”

Then tag groupings like:

me or me/wife, or wife

Then set the “my stuff” playlist to be the “library” playlist when I log in, and set the “wifes stuff” playlist to be the “library” playlist when she logs in.

Then other playlists would be the intersection of the playlist and the “base” playlist. So I might have a “No Country” (genre not includes “country”) and it would silently get turned into “(genre not includes ‘country’) and (grouping includes ‘me’)” when I query that playlists.

That’s where I want to get, anyway. Or cast to users based on user agent or ip address range.

Ron – Thanks again for such an amazing piece of software. To say I am well impressed is a major piece of understatement. It’s just brilliant!

Well, shucks. Thanks. 🙂

[S80_UK]

@rpedde wrote:

The thing I’m driving for is to be able to do two things:

1. Logs by user name
2. Set base library to be a smart playlist
3. Let smart playlist use a smart playlist as a criteria

So I could make a playlist like:

1. My stuff = grouping includes “me”
2. Wifes stuff = grouping includes “wife”

Then tag groupings like:

me or me/wife, or wife

Then set the “my stuff” playlist to be the “library” playlist when I log in, and set the “wifes stuff” playlist to be the “library” playlist when she logs in.

Then other playlists would be the intersection of the playlist and the “base” playlist. So I might have a “No Country” (genre not includes “country”) and it would silently get turned into “(genre not includes ‘country’) and (grouping includes ‘me’)” when I query that playlists.

I like that idea – seems rather more elegant than my approach. And the Browse feature would still work I think, since it would be presented with the contents of the “base” playlist. Cool. It’s a personal preference, but I use Browse almost exclusively rather than static or smart playlists. One would ideally need some neat tagging tools for tagging masses of files across directories in order to set the groupings. I guess there may be some tools out there that can handle that…?

[beerfan]

@S80_UK wrote:

I like that idea – seems rather more elegant than my approach. And the Browse feature would still work I think, since it would be presented with the contents of the “base” playlist. Cool. It’s a personal preference, but I use Browse almost exclusively rather than static or smart playlists. One would ideally need some neat tagging tools for tagging masses of files across directories in order to set the groupings. I guess there may be some tools out there that can handle that…?

I’m surprised that you needed to make multiple instances. Did you split the databases? I created smart playlists for my wife’s stuff and some for my stuff all on the same instance. Yeah, we see each other’s playlists but other than that it’s easy to find what you want to listen to. I also browse within a playlist sometimes as that’s easy to do with iTunes or Rhythmbox. I don’t know about a Roku client…

[S80_UK]

@beerfan wrote:

I’m surprised that you needed to make multiple instances. Did you split the databases?

As per my write up, each instance looks at a different selection of folders and each has its own database, so the databases are separate but will have some content which is common.

@beerfan wrote:

I created smart playlists for my wife’s stuff and some for my stuff all on the same instance. Yeah, we see each other’s playlists but other than that it’s easy to find what you want to listen to.

How? I don’t see how I could easily choose to play an album from within a playlist, or indeed to queue more than one and then play them.

@beerfan wrote:

I also browse within a playlist sometimes as that’s easy to do with iTunes or Rhythmbox. I don’t know about a Roku client…

Well, since I am only using the Roku’s to play the music, I could not think of another way of handling it. I certainly don’t want to have a PC running iTunes or similar just to do this – somehow it defeats the opject of running Firefly on the NSLU2. I could have created some smart playlists, but as far as I can tell that would not allow me to then search by artist, album etc as I can with the native Browse mode of the Roku.

[rpedde]

@beerfan wrote:

I created smart playlists for my wife’s stuff and some for my stuff all on the same instance. Yeah, we see each other’s playlists but other than that it’s easy to find what you want to listen to.

How? I don’t see how I could easily choose to play an album from within a playlist, or indeed to queue more than one and then play them.
[/quote]

As a side note, the rsp protocol allows browing by artist or album or genre from within a playlist. Roku didn’t implement it, though.

— Ron

[schmove]

Hi,

I have recently bought an NSLU2 and a soundbridge and managed to get firefly installed after a few hours of tinkering. This is my first linux experience so the walk through tutorials were a great help.

Basically, what i’d like to do now is the same as S80_UK has done, one server for my music, one for the girlfriend etc etc. All my music is on an external hdd and apart from installing firefly my unslung Nslu2 is pretty much as it was when i first installed linux on it.

I’ve read as many threads as i can and apparently this shouldn’t be too hard to do, but i don’t really know where to start as i couldn’t find any idiot guides. I can log into firefly on the nslu2 and change music directories and port numbers etc so what i really need is just a few pointers in the right direction.

Do i need to keep downloading and installing more versions of firefly? or simply create more config files?

Any help at all would be great, or just tell me i’m in out of my depth and i’m sure i’ll get over it.

Cheers,

Chris.

[rpedde]

@schmove wrote:

Do i need to keep downloading and installing more versions of firefly? or simply create more config files?

Really, just config files.

Copy the existing config file (/opt/etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd.conf) to a new one (/opt/etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd-other.conf), and edit it appropriately.

The things you’ll *have* to change:

servername
mp3_dir (obviously)
port
db_parms (to make a new db dir… mabye /opt/var/mt-daapd-other, or something that matches your config file)

Once you have those changed, run a new copy of mt-daapd with the new config (or copy /opt/etc/init.d/S60mt-daapd to /opt/etc/init.d/S60mt-daapd-other and edit it).

/opt/sbin/mt-daapd -c /opt/etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd-other.conf

That should do it. Ideally, there would be a separate mdns provider (like avahi) for mdns. I might look at putting that in unslung.

— Ron

[removablebrain]

@rpedde wrote:

Really, just config files.

Copy the existing config file (/opt/etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd.conf) to a new one (/opt/etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd-other.conf), and edit it appropriately.

The things you’ll *have* to change:

servername
mp3_dir (obviously)
port
db_parms (to make a new db dir… mabye /opt/var/mt-daapd-other, or something that matches your config file)

Once you have those changed, run a new copy of mt-daapd with the new config (or copy /opt/etc/init.d/S60mt-daapd to /opt/etc/init.d/S60mt-daapd-other and edit it).

/opt/sbin/mt-daapd -c /opt/etc/mt-daapd/mt-daapd-other.conf

That should do it. Ideally, there would be a separate mdns provider (like avahi) for mdns. I might look at putting that in unslung.

If I am running my own compiled version on OS X, how do I start a second instance?

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