SqueezeCenter

[delange]

There is certainly something wrong. Your logs show that SC imported 15 iTunes playlists.

I would do the following:

1. disable the experimental scanner (and leave it disabled)
2. uninstall SC (FrontView -> Services -> Streaming Services). Click remove under SqueeceCenter
3. install SC again

The above will make sure that you start with a clean SC database.

[pindropsoup]

Once I reinstalled SC, it would no longer work. I tried repeating de/installation and rebooting, but no matter what SC would not start up. I called Netgear, they took $70 and after about an hour corrected the problem by uploading/installing cleanslimserver. I was hopeful they would actually address the other problem but they don't support Squeezecenter (he said).

So after another full day of varioius tweaks, I am back where I started. I cannot get this thing to load itunes playlists. or anything from itunes for that matter. It scans the files like before (16 playlists even though there are only 2 in my test directory) but nothing shows up.

I've now spend way too much time on this. I don't even really want iTunes - I want playlists.

I have an 80 GB music library and want to access it via playlists - I was told iTunes was the way to go.

I really like the Squeezebox product, loving the radio services - but Squeezecenter is junk or at least the implementation is in the Readynas 1100.

There are several threads about getting SC to work - or scan (takes over 8 hours to complete a library scan for me). But there is very little discussion about playlists. What are the options?

[delange]

Once I reinstalled SC, it would no longer work. I tried repeating de/installation and rebooting, but no matter what SC would not start up. I called Netgear, they took $70 and after about an hour corrected the problem by uploading/installing cleanslimserver.

That tells me there was something wrong with SC’s database. I would not use the experimental scanner because I suspect that to be the cause of the corrupted database.

So after another full day of varioius tweaks, I am back where I started. I cannot get this thing to load itunes playlists. or anything from itunes for that matter. It scans the files like before (16 playlists even though there are only 2 in my test directory) but nothing shows up.

I've now spend way too much time on this. I don't even really want iTunes - I want playlists.

I have an 80 GB music library and want to access it via playlists - I was told iTunes was the way to go.

I can assure you that it works. It works great on my system and there are plenty of other users here who use SC and iTunes. There must be something wrong with the setup / configuration.

Maybe we need to take it from the top again. I guess we missed a small but important step. Can you answer the following questions so that I understand your setup better:

1. What format does your music have (wav, mp3, acc, ...)?
2. I guess you have your music on your NAS. Did you create a specific share for that or did you store in the “media\Music” folder?
3. How do you access your music from your PC – Did you map a drive from your NAS – what location do you point to if your use Windows Explorer to navigate to you music folder?

With the above information I will try to provide you a detailed step by step procedure in order to setup the system.

I really like the Squeezebox product, loving the radio services -

It is a great system. It would be a shame that it wouldn’t work for you.

but Squeezecenter is junk or at least the implementation is in the Readynas 1100.

I can understand that you are frustrated with it now. But hang in there – this stuff really works.

There are several threads about getting SC to work - or scan (takes over 8 hours to complete a library scan for me). But there is very little discussion about playlists. What are the options?

Yes there is a lot of information about SC on the ReadyNAS product. Many people complain about the slow scanning speed of SC, mainly on the SPARC systems. But, really, you should not be concerned with the amount of time the system takes to scan your library. Here’s why:
1. The initial (aka, the first scan) will take quite long, but the consecutive scans (let’s call it the ‘updates’) will be a lot faster.
2. You should let SC scan your library at night. I doesn’t matter how long it takes because you are sleeping during that time.

Even if you only want playlists, you need an application to build and maintain these playlists. iTunes is a great application for managing your music library and playlists. So hang in there I’m sure we can make it work.

[pindropsoup]

Delange did you get my PM (private message)?

[delange]

Yes I did but I’m a bit busy lately and that’s why I haven’t replied yet. I’ll try to do that this weekend.
Sorry to keep you waiting.

[Dogberry]

Creating playlists on a PC and then getting them installed on the ReadyNAS so that SqueezeCenter can use them is not difficult, per se, but there are a couple of things that can trip you up until you understand what's happening. The main trouble most people have is that playlists created on a PC refer to the files (i.e. the tracks) in one way, and the NAS refers to them in another way. This is not unique to the ReadyNAS, or a problem with its design; it's simply a matter of the PC and the NAS using different operating systems, and different file path conventions.

There have been many questions and discussions about this on the SlimDevices forums. Here's a link to an explanation that might help make things clearer. The question came from somebody running SC on a different (i.e. inferior ) brand of NAS, but it applies to the ReadyNAS as well.

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthrea ... post440333

A search of the SlimDevices forums should also turn up other discussions about creating playlists on one system (a PC), and migrating them to another (your NAS).

Hope this is helpful.

[tnorris]

This goes right along with my suggestion earlier to run a cron job on the NAS that "corrects" the playlist paths on the NAS. I threw something together that seems to do the job. If you run this script on the NAS it'll correct the paths for any existing playlists. Note, the paths need to be adjusted in the script to match the person's system. If you are always creating new playlists, then just set it up as a cron job.

All it does it find all m3u files in the specified directory and replaces each windows drive name w/ the starting path on the NAS and each backslash with a forward slash.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

playlist_path='/home/xxx/Desktop' # the directory the playlists are in on the NAS

# Find all m3u files in the playlist_path
for file in $playlist_path/*.m3u
do
  # strip extension from source file name
  target=$playlist_path'/'`basename $file .m3u`_linux.m3u

  # skip files that don't contain the window's source path
  if ((`grep 'M:\\\\' $file | wc -l` != 0)); then
    sed 's/M:\\/\/c\/share\//' $file | sed 's/\\/\//g' > $target
  fi
 
  #uncomment the next line to have the new m3u replace the old one
  #mv $target $file
done


[pindropsoup]

Ok this is making sense, but doesn't seem quite right for iTunes.

With the Itunes plugin, it wants the library XML file - that file will have all wrong paths.

Now the ReadyNAS can't play iTunes. That means the plugin has to assume the file is being used on a PC or Mac. So I am not the first to have this problem. I assumed the plugin did some of the conversion, but maybe it doesn't have enough information.

Might be better to use Media Monkey or something more flexible than iTunes. I like that I can play flac. But that means having to manually manage duplicate/separate playlists. If that is the answer I will take it - but I don't understand how the itunes plugin is supposed to work on the ReadyNas.

[delange]

The iTunes plugin works perfect. I use it and everything, including the playlists, work just fine. If it doesn’t work then it means there is something wrong with the setup / configuration. It is important that all iTunes information (music files, library files, etc) reside on the NAS and not on any laptop / desktop.
As soon as I get the time I’ll document in detail how I have set it up.

[toms]

To answer your questions this does work on the Ready NAS. Regarding your question about the paths in the library XML file the itunes plugin is smart enough to do what it calls "normalize" the paths, which essentially means it takes the folder you told it the music was in on the NAS and changes the path from the library file to look there.

I just successfully installed this on my Ready NAS Duo, but had a few challenges. What really helped me was to turn on the scanner logging. Doing this will tell you what is happening during the scan.

On your SC settings page go to Adanced tab, you'll see a drop down in the upper left corner, pick logging. Scroll down and go to (plugin.itunes) - iTunes Synchronization Information, pick the drop down next to it and set it to Debug.

Once you've done this click back on the Basic tab and click the rescan link under rescan music library.

Now you can go to the information tab and at the bottom you see scanner log file, click that link. Post the log output which may help identify the problem.

My problems was that for the music folder setting it doesn't actually want the Music folder, it wants the folder above it typically the same folder your itunes library is in.

For example my folder is /media/iTunes Music/Music/Artist Name/Album Name/Song Name.MP3 I was giving it the /media/iTunes Music/Music folder for the "iTunes Music Folder" setting.

What it wants is just /media/iTunes Music for the setting. It will actually append the directory "Music" to this when it tries to "normalize" the path I mentioned above. My scanner log clearly showed it was trying to normalize to a path with Music/Music in it. Good luck and try to post the scanner log info if you don't get anywhere.

[pindropsoup]

Tried creating a playlist with MediaMonkey. That worked seamlessly. The paths in the file were relative ..\etc. with backslashes, but the NetgearSC figured it out.

Tried again with iTunes with debugging.

It is complaining about some wav files it doesn't support, but no real complaints about anything else I see. No mention of itunes at all - but the scanner progress says it is importing 5 itunes playlists.

Playlist scan 1 of 1 (MediaMonkey)
ITunes Import 1714 of 1714 ? ?????
ITunes Playlist import 15 of 15 (only playlist on SC is the one from MediaMokey)


Here is the Scaner Log File: (With iTunes scanner in debug?):


[09-09-11 11:12:17.7113] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-11 11:49:35.9458] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-11 11:53:50.2283] Slim::Utils::SQLHelper::executeSQLFile (85) Error: Couldn't execute SQL statement: [INSERT INTO contributor_album (role,contributor,album) SELECT DISTINCT role,contributor,album FROM contributor_track,tracks where tracks.id=contributor_track.track;] : [DBD::mysql::db do failed: Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails (`slimserver/contributor_album`, CONSTRAINT `contributor_album_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`album`) REFERENCES `albums` (`id`) ON DELETE CASCADE) at /usr/share/perl5/Slim/Utils/SQLHelper.pm line 83, <$fh> line 36.
]
[09-09-11 12:31:39.0120] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-11 13:25:22.2272] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-11 16:23:18.1821] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /c/media/Music/msg0000.WAV: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-11 17:25:12.8173] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /c/media/Music/Nili/Nili2.wav: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-11 20:01:44.2837] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /c/media/Music/bortvPortion.WAV: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-11 23:04:38.7434] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-12 01:30:24.4177] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-12 01:35:34.3027] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-12 01:46:38.0724] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-12 02:18:37.1481] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-12 03:08:41.8983] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /media/Music/Nili/Nili2.wav: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-12 03:28:36.2277] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /media/Music/bortvPortion.WAV: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-25 23:43:00.2619] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-26 02:24:03.3537] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)
[09-09-26 03:21:11.6383] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /media/Music/Nili/Nili2.wav: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-26 03:39:17.1725] Slim::Formats::Wav::__ANON__ (45) Error: /media/Music/bortvPortion.WAV: seems to be compressed, I can't handle anything other than uncompressed PCM
[09-09-26 15:45:41.4739] main::main (122) Starting SqueezeCenter scanner (v7.3.3, r27044, Mon Jun 15 15:19:30 PDT 2009)

[delange]

I have send you a word document that explains my setup by email.
Hope it is usefull to you.

Good luck.

[pmethold]

Hi Delange,

Please could you send me a copy of your setup word doc as I am trying to solve the same problem.

Many thanks

[pindropsoup]

No matter what I try, I can't import iTunes. I tried the debugging, but that seems to always generate the same file.... I can't see a file date - but the contents of the log file never changes.

I followed everything Delange suggested. It says it is importing playlists and songs but it doesn't. So the only way I see to make playlists is to use MediaMonkey or probably anything but iTunes. Media Monkey sorts out the slashes and paths too, requires no editing.

I don't have a good track record when it comes to successfully getting any Apple product to do something outside the walled garden. So I won't put all the blame on SC - obviously other people got it to work. SC does everything else fine.

[delange]

[quote="pindropsoup"]Media Monkey sorts out the slashes and paths too, requires no editing.
quote]

There are no slashes and or paths to edit by iTunes. I don’t understand what you mean by that.

Anyway, did you publish your troubles on the Slimdevices forum too?