I don't really know what keywords to search for, as "server" or "LMS" will find many irrelevant threads, so I hope you don't mind me asking this...
The scenario I'm now using my SBT in is thus: my wife and I both own a considerable (although relatively small, compared to others) amount of music. I got about 4800 pieces (not including things like comedy or stuff that I don't want to listen to while enjoying music), my wife about 1800. Of course, each of us has stuff that the other person would like to listen to, too. The solution to that would be to have personal playlists, of course (their creation and maintenance shall be a different topic). Before moving together with my wife last Decembre, my usage of the SBT was "power on if necessary, let it connect to the LBT on my PC which was always on when I was home anyway, and just let it play random titles" - so I didn't worry about the SBT's functions too much.
Infrastructure-wise, I'm a bit averse to wasting electricity and having devices running 24/7 all the time if it's not unavoidable. It's okay that the SBT is on all the time, but I wouldn't want my big tower PC to run too, just so there's a LMS available. So I plugged in a USB thumb drive that I filled with our combined music and fire up the SBT's internal (or embedded, whichever it is officially called) version of the LMS.
Then I set up a Windows task that's scheduled to run a script doing the following tasks every Sunday afternoon or whenever the PC comes up again:
1) connect to the SBT
2) update the MP3 files on that USB thumb drive if there are new/changed/removed ones using the UNC path
3) update the playlists, too
While all of this sounded like a good idea at first, it turned out that it is not:
1) our personal playlists grow way too big to be handled by the SBT's LMS
2) the embedded LMS does not appreciate an accidental .lnk or other file it's supposed to play but can't, and crashes most ungracefully. (I feel like it can even crash on an unexpected cover image format. It seems very fragile altogether.)
3) the embedded LMS also does not react very well to its file base being out of synch with its database. So after updating the files I need to stop and restart the LMS again to force a re-scan of the library.
Issue #2 can be reduced by applying better file filters when copying. This was already done.
Issue #3 I can maybe handle by using the CLI with some scripted telnet after running the update script. Need to look into that.
But issue #1 remains. I went and tried solving the problem by not using playlists but applying genres - one for me, one for my wife. I think it does work, but it's a bit cumbersome. And after learning about the SSH access here, I wondered whether there's an alternate implementation to the LMS that people like to use. I did read somewhere about some other server software with half the memory footprint, so I hope there is something that can handle larger playlists while at the same time being transparent to the SBT's user, so that the GUI and CLI functions of the SBT still remain as they are and that neither my wife nor e.g. the Squeezer app or my yet-hypothetical telnet script would know that it's not the "original" LMS running anymore.
So, would you have any suggestions? I'd be grateful to hear them, if there is such a thing.
The scenario I'm now using my SBT in is thus: my wife and I both own a considerable (although relatively small, compared to others) amount of music. I got about 4800 pieces (not including things like comedy or stuff that I don't want to listen to while enjoying music), my wife about 1800. Of course, each of us has stuff that the other person would like to listen to, too. The solution to that would be to have personal playlists, of course (their creation and maintenance shall be a different topic). Before moving together with my wife last Decembre, my usage of the SBT was "power on if necessary, let it connect to the LBT on my PC which was always on when I was home anyway, and just let it play random titles" - so I didn't worry about the SBT's functions too much.
Infrastructure-wise, I'm a bit averse to wasting electricity and having devices running 24/7 all the time if it's not unavoidable. It's okay that the SBT is on all the time, but I wouldn't want my big tower PC to run too, just so there's a LMS available. So I plugged in a USB thumb drive that I filled with our combined music and fire up the SBT's internal (or embedded, whichever it is officially called) version of the LMS.
Then I set up a Windows task that's scheduled to run a script doing the following tasks every Sunday afternoon or whenever the PC comes up again:
1) connect to the SBT
2) update the MP3 files on that USB thumb drive if there are new/changed/removed ones using the UNC path
3) update the playlists, too
While all of this sounded like a good idea at first, it turned out that it is not:
1) our personal playlists grow way too big to be handled by the SBT's LMS
2) the embedded LMS does not appreciate an accidental .lnk or other file it's supposed to play but can't, and crashes most ungracefully. (I feel like it can even crash on an unexpected cover image format. It seems very fragile altogether.)
3) the embedded LMS also does not react very well to its file base being out of synch with its database. So after updating the files I need to stop and restart the LMS again to force a re-scan of the library.
Issue #2 can be reduced by applying better file filters when copying. This was already done.
Issue #3 I can maybe handle by using the CLI with some scripted telnet after running the update script. Need to look into that.
But issue #1 remains. I went and tried solving the problem by not using playlists but applying genres - one for me, one for my wife. I think it does work, but it's a bit cumbersome. And after learning about the SSH access here, I wondered whether there's an alternate implementation to the LMS that people like to use. I did read somewhere about some other server software with half the memory footprint, so I hope there is something that can handle larger playlists while at the same time being transparent to the SBT's user, so that the GUI and CLI functions of the SBT still remain as they are and that neither my wife nor e.g. the Squeezer app or my yet-hypothetical telnet script would know that it's not the "original" LMS running anymore.
So, would you have any suggestions? I'd be grateful to hear them, if there is such a thing.