Forum Overview :: Audiosurf :: Squeezebox update and forum guidelines

[quote name="Ray of Light"][quote cite="PLEASE READ"]This is the forum for posts which would otherwise be appropriate in <i>both</i> "Honda Civic" and "Stairway." Topics may include the IT end of audio, or the unique challenges of motorized music (<a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=75700">QB</a>)[/quote] It's been two weeks with the Squeezebox. I'm impressed by the software; you can choose between mature-but-clunky v6, called Slimserver, or late-beta v7 which was renamed SqueezeCenter. The beta gets you antialiased fonts on the device, a mysql backend (replacing sqlite) and AJAXish web interface that is sluggish but otherwise pleasant to use. The server, being Perl-based, is omni-platform; I'm using Debian on minimal-spec hardware and it runs well (device response to remote inputs is instant; searches complete in one second, or about three times faster than Winmop on a maximal-spec desktop). There are complaints about poor Windows performance; some turn out to be the fault of virus scanners, and some don't. The supplied mysql config (stored in my.tt) is niggardly about memory; you the user must adjust all those numbers upward to get good performance with large libraries. Plugins are a mixed bag. Out of millions extant, there are maybe 100 that work and 10 that are any good. <a href=http://www.hickinbottom.com/>Hickinbottom's</a> "Lazy Search" and "AutoRescan", plus <a href="http://www.tux.org/~peterw/index.html#slim">Peter W.'s</a> "StatusFirst" addressed my most pressing UI concerns. I've otherwise left the plugin world unexplored. Honorable mention goes to <a href="http://erland.homeip.net/download/">Av Erland Isaksson</a> who has a bunch of fancy plugins that some people are very excited about. Having all the tag info in a real, queryable database is a (new to me and) very exciting development. For example, I was having genre headaches around the time Zseni started a thread about it, because without genre tags the shuffle function can't successfully exclude albums like "Verbal Advantage Complete Vocabulary." Most library browsers have a spreadsheet-style interface that's fine for "genre=Audiobook" but sucks at "(genre=*Audio* or *Book* or *Self-Help*) OR (tracks_per_album > 20)." With the squeezecenter database and a decent grasp of SQL (or, in my case, a pidgin grasp of SQL and a knack for some other text-processing language) this kind of search is possible and not all that hard. I also made a query to show all the genres that appeared in only one or two directories ("#IndieTorrents @ EFnet"), and cleaned those with Tag&Rename, refiling as one of the eight kinds of music that I like. [/quote]