Jim McIntyre's List: Squeezebox

• Installation

   

  SqueezeCenter 7.3 includes a web interface for easy plugin installation. See the list of sources that make plugins available for easy web-based installation. 

  To install a 3rd party plugin for SqueezeCenter 7, you will need to: 

   
  • Download the plugin file (often a ZIP) from the owner's site (linked from the directory pages above) 
  • Put the file(s) in the SqueezeCenter 3rd party plugins directory. 

• Techie note: If you're running Moose on the same machine as your Squeezecenter, you should have it use the MySQL scanning option to build its library. If you're using Moose from another computer, see the techie note below.
• Techie note: You will need to forward ports 3483 and 9090 to the machine running SqueezeCenter in order to connect from Softsqueeze.
• 1. Don't think that you're stuck controlling Softsqueeze with its own interface. You can use Moose to do this! If you're going to do that, keep reading, and then check the "use system tray" checkbox in the Softsqueeze settings. This will make Softsqueeze minimize to the system tray rather than the taskbar in Windows when you minimize it. That is awesome.
     
     
  2. If you have FLAC or other high-bitrate audio files in your library (and you should), make sure you enable bitrate limiting, or you will get choppy audio. To do this, have Softsqueeze running, then go into the SqueezeCenter web interface, and click on Settings. Select your Softsqueeze player from the player dropdown, then go to the Audio menu. Select a bitrate from the Bitrate Limiting dropdown (I'd recommend 192 if you have a normal internet connection at home with crappy upload speed, but play around and see what works for you), and a LAME quality level (I haven't found a big difference in the LAME quality level). NB: If you see a note that says something along the lines of "you don't have lame installed on your system," you will need to install it. Even if it says "The LAME encoder appears to be installed correctly on your system" it may not work unless you copy lame.exe into c:\windows\system32\.
     
  If you're using Moose to control Softsqueeze on a remote machine, Moose will need its own local library (.moo) file. If you're like me, and you're frequently updating your library, you will want to keep this file up to date. There are a few ways to do this:
• 
  MusicIP is similar to Pandora or Slacker or Last.FM: it makes playlists for you based on songs you already know. The huge difference is that it does this out of tracks from your own library. If you have a large music library like I do (58,590 tracks and climbing), you sometimes forget what you have. Or you have stuff that you wanted to own, but you've never listened to every track. MusicIP is a perfect fit here. You give it a song (or an album, or an artist) and tell it to generate a mix based on that input. It gives you back a mix of songs from your library that have musical qualities in common with the seed song. It's a great way to get re-acquainted with your own music collection.
• NB: If you don't want all your file timestamps getting updated to today, go into the preferences before you scan and check "Preserve file modification time when updating tags."
  
• Doing things in that order will ensure that SqueezeCenter can see your MusicIP instance.

4 more annotations...

• 4. I elected to go with a Solid State Drive (SSD) instead of a standard spinning hard drive. It just did not make sense to me to put in a noisy drive after piecing together an otherwise silent system. Not all SSDs are created equal. The price of two drives of the same size can vary by thousands of dollars based on the speed and build architecture of the units. The real cheap SSDs are based on Multi-level Cell (MLC) flash memory which is much less desirable than SLC based drives. Single-level Cell (SLC) drives are faster, consume less power, and last longer. These SLC drives obviously command a higher price. Since I'm not a fan of the MLC drives I selected a Samsung 64GB SATA II drive (model MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA00). This drive has plenty of room for the operating system and a decent number of uncompressed albums. This system is a perfect reason to purchase that NAS drive you've been longing for over the last year. SSD price $550

• 1. MM3 & Portable players use sync on MM3
  2. I've created a playlist node called "A - Squeeze" - This has playlists in it that i want to use with the Squeezecenter.
  3. In Squeezecenter i've set my destination for playlists as "F:\Playlists\A - Squeeze"
  4. Using the Modified Export all m3u's script below i run that to export the playlists within folders in "F:\Playlists\A - Squeeze", you can see i've hard coded the destinations and playlist node.

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    See below also
• For those interested in exporting mthere playlists to Squeezebox: I've just posted a MediaMonkey script that exports all playlist to your squeezebox folder (after cleaning up old playlists).
  
  You can find it @ http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=58432