I've been using it with my Mac for the past year & a half. It works perfectly.
What you really need to do is have your music on an external drive (and backed up to another). That way when your collection grows, you simply buy a bigger drive.
Also, if somone swipes your computer, they'll probably miss taking that external drive hiding under the desk :-) |
I use the squeezebox server software with a Mac mini - it works just fine. |
I'd look into LVM. This allows you to add space to your music library in an easy and transparent fashion.
Although it's not as nice for organizing files, you can always just add a symlink in your music library directory that points to extra disk space. |
Yes, you're right, I can relatively easily add space to my old Linux box. But the limiting factor at some point may become the horsepower of the machine, although it doesn't take an enormously fast machine to function as the Squeezebox Server. And there is also the desire to consolidate some of the functions of various computers I have scattered around the house for simplicity and ease of making backups.
Traudio, do you use a Mac OS X desktop or Server version? Did you have MySQL previously installed on your Mac? Did you just install the Squeezebox Server on the DMG or did you build the Perl Source Code?
I haven't tried it yet, but when I get a chance I will simply try the DMG and see if that works. I was just wondering if anyone had any pointers or encountered some unexpected gotchas.
Thanks,
Michael |
Michael,
I'm not really sure what all you're asking, but it's just a regular iMac in a spare bedroom, with a couple of external hard drives on Firewire 800.
I just downloaded the Squeezebox Server software, installed, pointed it towards my library and that's about all it takes. It's very simple.
I got the iPeng app on my iPod Touch (great app BTW) and run everything from the comfort of my couch as the music is sent wirelessly to my Modwright Transporter. |
Traudio, can you leave the iMac in "Sleep" mode and still access the music files, or do you have to leave it on? |
I have an iMac with squeezebox server. When I hit sleep, the tunes stop. |
Audiowoman, so you just leave your iMac powered on all the time? Or at least when you want to listen (or use the computer)? |
yes, we leave it on all the time, just put it to sleep when we are not using it or listening to music. We turn it off once a week for updates etc. or if it is stormy outside. |
Has anyone upgraded to Lion and tested its compatibility with the Squeezebox Server or any Mac-based music server system? I'm holding off for a few days to see how it shakes out before upgrading.
Michael |
Sufentanil,
I put Lion on last night, it works fine.
Can't say the same for Squeeze server 7.6, it's totally screwed up. |
Traudio, can you be a little more specific when you say that Squeezecenter 7.6 is "totally screwed up" with Lion?
I am still using Snow Leopard until all of my ducks are in a row to make the upgrade and retain full capabilities for getting back to Snow Leopard if necessary. I have enough important data and server services, and these depend on several cron jobs that I've established, etc, so I will likely have to do some tweaking after I've upgraded to Lion.
In the meantime, I'm still using Squeezecenter on Linux because it continues to work just fine, although I still am planning on transitioning it to the Mac because the Mac is a MUCH more powerful machine than my old Linux box.
Thanks again for your info.
Michael |
I have upgraded to Lion, updated squeezebox and am not having any issues at all. I did have to upgrade the squeezebox and re enter passwords etc. initially. |
I'd like to use my older g4 mac mini 1.25GHz as a music server (running Squeezebox server) on my home network. The mini will be installed in the router room and not in the listening areas. I'll use a couple of Squeezebox Touches & a Squeezebox radio. I understand I need to install Squeezebox server on the mac mini & I'll have an external hard drive attached to the mini with the music files on it. I'll be using another computer to rip CDS & do downloads, etc. How do I set this ripping computer, which at the time is a iBook G4 (and will be hooked up via ethernet to the network), up so that the rips and downloads go directly to the external hard drive on the mac mini (are there settings on the macs)? |
I couldn't get my squeezable to recognize my Mac based system. Logitech support was non existant |
No problems here with a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard and now Lion. One annoyance, though, is that the preference pane only runs in 32 bits, so I have to wait for it to restart the Preferences app in 32 bit mode every time I want work with the preference pane.
Caudio2011 - As far as automatically saving a file ripped on another computer to the one running the server, I have not tried this, but you might try mounting a shared folder from the server computer on the desktop of the ripping computer and directing the ripping program to save the output to that folder. Not sure that is a good idea because of the slow speed of moving the data across ethernet, relative to the speed of the rip being done. I haven't bothered because I make backups at the same time I move files to the server computer so it would actually slow the process down to rip the files directly to the remote server computer and then move a copy across the network again to the backup disk. |
Caudio2011, share your mini's external HD and mount it from your laptop. Then simply select that mounted drive in the laptop when you specify the destination for the rip.
Michael |
I use it on WIndows.
Had some issues after upgrading this past week to the latest published version.
Artwork for .wav files stopped loading. I had to upgrade to a more recent beta release to get this new bug fixed.
Also they dropped the handheld skin in recent versions, which made my Windows Mobile browser less useful as a controller. I found a blog post where that provided the files though and once i put these in teh right directory, the handheld skin worked again, however it appears that it is being dropped from support which I think is a bad decision in that I find it fills a more useful niche in the controller device world than the classic skin that was retained. The classic skin is inferior to the default and handheld skin IMHO. standard skin is more functional on typical pc browsers and hand held same on handheld device browsers.
Of course, Iphones and android devices are supported with the new controller program you can install so that is probably the way to go for those newer devices.
Apple and PC covers most users so I would expect both to be solid platforms in general, more so than Linus, which must be a minority platform I suspect.
I was a bit taken back though with the inconsistencies and on off changes in the latest release though, and I suspect that this may be the case on all platforms.
The Squeezebox server has been mostly very reliable to date. I hope these recent issues are just a blip and not some new pattern that worsens over time. NOthing beats good QC! I'd say the regression testing was lacking with this latest server version release.
I am pretty computer savy yet it took me several hours to work through these issues and get my library back to the state it was prior. A novice would probably have had little chance and ended up with a broken server and a lot more angst. |
Sufentanil, For clarification. What you are saying is to physically attach the external drive to the lap top for ripping purposes and then after ripping reattach the external drive to the mac mini? |
Caudio2011, no, I'm saying to hook the external HD to the Mini. Then on the Mini go to Settings -> Sharing, and select the external HD to share. Then from your laptop navigate in the Finder to the shared drive on the mini (remotely). This will be your save as location for the discs ripped on the laptop.
So the external HD stays on the Mini, but you access it from the laptop across your network, and save the files there.
Does that make sense?
Michael |
Sufentanil, I think I got it now. I did try last night seeing if I could select the ext. hard drive attached to the mini, but I was unable too. I went into the Sharing from System Preferences on the mini & selected Personal File Sharing box (BTW the mac mini is running OS 10.4.11 the iBook is running 10.5.8) - thinking this might be a box that i need to select after searching on line for an answer. Yet, last night it didn't seem to help, but now tonight, after getting verification from you that the ext. hard drive should be attached to the mac mini, I fired up the mini & was able to access the ext. hard drive via the iBook. Either the mac mini had to go through a restart after checking the Personal File Sharing box or else last night I was signing in to the mac mini as a Guest and not as a registered user. I didn't see those two options (Guest or Register User) the past few days as I've been experimenting with screen sharing. I'll have to experiment some more to see exactly what enabled the ability to access the mac mini ext. hard drive from the iBook. |
Sufentanil, for a follow up. I attempted to connect as a Guest & was unable to see the ext. hard drive as an option, but then connecting as a register user I was. On the IBook, the ext. drive does not show up under the Shared column to the far left on the finder window. First, there is the DEVICES heading followed by SHARED heading. Under the SHARED heading is the mac mini, which in my case is simply called Mac. I click on Mac and then to the right part of the finder window the ext. hard drive and the internal Macintosh (mac mini) hard drives are shown. Is this the way things are presented? Or should the ext. hard drive also show up under the SHARED heading to the far left in the Finder window?
BTW you wrote: "Then on the Mini go to Settings -> Sharing, and select the external HD to share." I failed to mention in my previous post that this option was never presented to me. You're saying that this option should appear if I go to System Preferences - select Sharing & then an option to select the ext. hard drive should be there? |
Caudio2011 - to share the external drive connected to the Mac Mini, open the "get info" window for the external drive by either single clicking on the drive icon to highlight it and typing command-i or selecting get info from the finder File menu. Once the get info window is open you should see a check box under the "general" section for making the drive a shared folder. Click that box and close the window. You now should be able to mount the shared external drive on your iMac, assuming sharing is turned on for the Mac Mini (under System Preferences->sharing).
You will probably have to enter your Mac Mini password to change any file name or location on the shared folder after this. I recommend not trying to change file names on the external drive from in the image mounted on your iMac - I have had nothing but trouble (files disappearing until rebooting the remote computer) doing this. |
Caudio2011, yes, I meant "System Preferences-->Sharing". You're almost there. From the Sharing settings, you can control which users have access to the data and what type of access they have (read-only, read+write, etc). Your user will need read+write privileges for adding new ripped CD data to it.
Michael |
