SqueezePlug for Raspberry Pi ready for download

[mba]

I tried the version 5 alpha build, first time I ran it it played for 2 min then sound started to stutter and seconds later it was complete dropouts of 5s and just short bursts of music. Looking at processes with top showed that faad was using alot of cpu along with squeezebox server:

1887 squeezeb 20 0 109m 80m 6372 S 26.3 34.6 2:32.57 squeezeboxserve
1947 squeezeb 20 0 2700 1012 732 S 23.1 0.4 0:15.78 faad
1803 root 20 0 50072 6696 1508 S 6.8 2.8 0:15.46 squeezeslave

After a couple of moments the processes normalized but audio remained broken.
I rebooted the system and second time music played for 5min, I then wanted to change channels and found that no channels was listed under internet radio. This has happened one or twice before with the armel build of Squeezeplug.

I think I am bit unlucky here? Or is there others who are having the same problems as I?

[Dweeber]

I take it that this is designed to work with other media servers?

I've been looking for something that I can send data from a Tablet to the RPi for display on the TV via HDMI. There is something called Android Transporter from ESRlabs, but no new news since July.

[kodess]

SqueezePlug is primarily made to work as a media server.

SqueezeSlave, which is also included, is a Squeezebox software clone. Meaning that it works with Logitech Media Server but also with all other UPNP devices that can "Play To" devices.

[mba]

I tried the version 5 alpha build, first time I ran it it played for 2 min then sound started to stutter and seconds later it was complete dropouts of 5s and just short bursts of music. Looking at processes with top showed that faad was using alot of cpu along with squeezebox server:

1887 squeezeb 20 0 109m 80m 6372 S 26.3 34.6 2:32.57 squeezeboxserve
1947 squeezeb 20 0 2700 1012 732 S 23.1 0.4 0:15.78 faad
1803 root 20 0 50072 6696 1508 S 6.8 2.8 0:15.46 squeezeslave

After a couple of moments the processes normalized but audio remained broken.
I rebooted the system and second time music played for 5min, I then wanted to change channels and found that no channels was listed under internet radio. This has happened one or twice before with the armel build of Squeezeplug.

I think I am bit unlucky here? Or is there others who are having the same problems as I?

Ok, it seems that all my woes was resolved by running "apt-get upgrade" (which I thought I already had done on both armel and armhf). I will now try compiling SqueezePlay for armhf and see how it performs after the upgrade.

[mba]

Success!
I have now found the problem when that caused Squeezeplay to stutter after a short while. It has to do with the configuration of alsa. I replaced the content in /etc/asound.conf:

Code: Select all

pcm.mmap0 {
    type mmap_emul;
    slave {
      pcm "hw:0,0";
    }
}

pcm.!default {
  type plug;
  slave {
    pcm mmap0;
  }
}

with this:

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
}

ctl.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
}

I guess the emulated mmap did not play nice with Squeezeplay, or maybe the latency, I don't know.
After changing the configuration I have had Squeezeplay on constant radio for the last 9 hours. Changing channels and playing mp3's doesn't cause any problems either.

Personally I would prefer using Squeezeplay over Squeezeslave as it opens up the possibility of playing sounds at higher resolutions and samplerates, using the spotify plugin and I guess some of the radio channels that sounds like chipmunks works better in Squeezeplay. (Someone correct me if I am mistaken on some of these points as I am no expert).

[truehl]

Success!
I have now found the problem when that caused Squeezeplay to stutter after a short while. It has to do with the configuration of alsa. I replaced the content in /etc/asound.conf:

Code: Select all

pcm.mmap0 {
    type mmap_emul;
    slave {
      pcm "hw:0,0";
    }
}

pcm.!default {
  type plug;
  slave {
    pcm mmap0;
  }
}

with this:

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
}

ctl.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
}

I guess the emulated mmap did not play nice with Squeezeplay, or maybe the latency, I don't know.
After changing the configuration I have had Squeezeplay on constant radio for the last 9 hours. Changing channels and playing mp3's doesn't cause any problems either.

Personally I would prefer using Squeezeplay over Squeezeslave as it opens up the possibility of playing sounds at higher resolutions and samplerates, using the spotify plugin and I guess some of the radio channels that sounds like chipmunks works better in Squeezeplay. (Someone correct me if I am mistaken on some of these points as I am no expert).

Sounds good, did you also try with SqueezeSlave? How did you install SqueezePlay? Could you post the steps for the installation? Are you sure your changed asound.conf is reasonable for the effort? Did you run an rpi-update the last days? I think there are some firmware patches for internal sound made with the last patches. Last but not least, what OS are you running?

[mba]

I've had reasonable success with Squeezeslave but could still experience the odd dropout after playing a while this, I think, was solved by rpi-update / aptget upgrade. This did not solve my troubles with Squeezeplay though.

The system I am running SqueezePlay on now is the standard armhf wheezy from the download section. I updated, upgraded and rpi-updated before installing LMS according to this

I compiled SqueezePlay according to my instructions here. These, I found out later, are almost the same procedures described here. I think I would use the ARCH linux approach as this has the changes as patch files making it easier to get it going.

I had almost given up until I found some notes about changing asound.conf to the one I inserted in my previous post. This solved the problem immediately.

I am not sure what you mean by

Are you sure your changed asound.conf is reasonable for the effort?

but I have SqueezePlay running for 12h straight, at the moment playing some ogg files I have thrown at it, so yes I think its worth the effort if thats what you mean.

If I find some time I will test this setup on the wheezy armel distribution which makes it possible to use the 3rd party Spotify plugin from Triode. This will of course also make it possible to install LMS from the debian package without doing modifications as pr. the instructions at allthingspi.

Best regards
Martin

[truehl]

Hi folks,
great news for you: I've tried out the brand new patches and what shall I tell you, it works!!! I'm running sound very clear from the analogue audio jack without any cracks or other noise, great work!!! I 'm running the armhf version of SqueezeSlave without any modification of alsa config files. I've set the CPU speed to 1 Ghz and that also works very performant! It's like someone has released the breaks! I'll do a long term test of SqueezeSlave now to see if it stays stable!

So I have much more fun to go forward with my SqueezePlug 5.0 image !!!

Thanks to all involved.

P.S.: Don't forget to slide up volume from alsamixer!!!

Greetings,
Thomas

[andy100]

Thomas - I've been running your v5 Alpha for the past few weeks and it's been 100% stable, not a single jitter or stumble, all over HDMI.
I will update to the new firmware and test (before/after) the onboard 3.5mm output.

Martin - If you're using squeezeplay rather than squeezeslave, are you able to use multiple sound output at the same time? I ask because I would like squeezexxx and shairport at the same time but squeezeslave locks the sound device, so while the daemon is running (but LMS not actually playing anything), aplay for example can't play a file, or any other outputting application.

[truehl]

I also got Shairport working with a great sound, so one of the last puzzles is also found! I'll keep on testing and working on the new release! It's a lucky day!!!

[.helge]

Hi folks,
great news for you: I've tried out the brand new patches and what shall I tell you, it works!!! I'm running sound very clear from the analogue audio jack without any cracks or other noise, great work!!! I 'm running the armhf version of SqueezeSlave without any modification of alsa config files. I've set the CPU speed to 1 Ghz and that also works very performant! It's like someone has released the breaks! I'll do a long term test of SqueezeSlave now to see if it stays stable!

So I have much more fun to go forward with my SqueezePlug 5.0 image !!!

Thanks to all involved.

P.S.: Don't forget to slide up volume from alsamixer!!!

Greetings,
Thomas

Hi Thomas and everyone else,

you are my heros!! Especiallynow that Logitech seems to abandone Squeezebox as we know it

I've been testing the v5 Alpha image also after doing and apt-get upgrade/update yesterday. It's working smoothly. It syncs perfectly with my 4 other original squeezeboxes (3 receivers, 1 Radio).
Squeezeslave now runs as a deamon after I applied Thomas's. Nice piece of work! THANK YOU!

Helge

[jeremyroebuck]

Hi Thomas
Firstly a huge thanks for your work on this. I'm not a Linux user but have my Pi running without any difficulties thanks to your work & clear instructions. I'm not using it as a player just as a server for my 4 squeezeboxes which it does flawlessly.
Secondly, I saw yesterday that overclocking is now officially supported - see http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/overclocking and wondered whether we will be able to access this feature in the future. I'd be willing to test if that helps.
All the best from a cold & wet Scotland
Jeremy

[dibby_dibs]

Thank you so much for your work truehl !
I look forward to V5

v5 alpha has been running great here with 3 x raspberry pi slaves each with Behringer USB cards.

[StephenR]

I was trying to use the USB image tool to load the v5 image onto a Sandisk 4G card only to find the image is 3.977G while the card is 3.965G and so it won't fit. The v4.08b1 image was 3.872G so was no problem. Please advise how others can have success and I'm struggling. Thanks for your help.

cheers,

Stephen

[mwebster]

I had the same trouble with the SD card size. 4Gb didn't work, I had to use 8Gb.

[mwebster]

I was trying to use the USB image tool to load the v5 image onto a Sandisk 4G card only to find the image is 3.977G while the card is 3.965G and so it won't fit. The v4.08b1 image was 3.872G so was no problem. Please advise how others can have success and I'm struggling. Thanks for your help.

cheers,

Stephen

It's not just you. I had the same problem with my 4G card and ended up using an 8G card. My other troubles were I didn't run the raspi update and "./squeezeslave" is supposed to be "./squeezeslave.sh". It's working much better for me now, but I still occasionally get a popping noise when I switch tracks. I'm using the on-board audio and it sounds good to me other than the noise when switching tracks. I'm going to try a usb sound card to see if that fixes the popping. Good luck.

Matt

[StephenR]

It's working much better for me now, but I still occasionally get a popping noise when I switch tracks. I'm using the on-board audio and it sounds good to me other than the noise when switching tracks. I'm going to try a usb sound card to see if that fixes the popping.

From what I read, the V5 fixed that or is it still an issue?

cheers,

Stephen

[mwebster]

Not for me anymore. While trying to get it working, I had setup an asound.conf file like one posted in this topic to see if that would help anything. It didn't and I forgot to delete it. After upgrading the firmware, then deleting my asound.conf file, everything is working perfectly.

[HansGM]

Hi all,

anyone using the Netgear N150 with squeezeplug? The device is recognized as Realtek WLAN Adapter, but after "Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain" the system hangs. No difference whether the stick is present at boot or attached later. I tried both 4.08 and 5.0.

The stick is attached to a powered USB hub and working fine with Raspbian.

Maybe someone could help me, any hint would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Hans

[Hadyn98]

by StephenR » Fri Sep 21, 2012 8:35 pm
I was trying to use the USB image tool to load the v5 image onto a Sandisk 4G card only to find the image is 3.977G while the card is 3.965G and so it won't fit. The v4.08b1 image was 3.872G so was no problem. Please advise how others can have success and I'm struggling. Thanks for your help.

Hi I had this problem. I put the SD card into a Ubuntu PC, and deleted the last partition (which was badly formed due to the disk being too small). Since this partition is the swap file partition I assumed that there wasn't critical data/binaries on it and the system would be able to recover (if that is even necessary before actually running the first time). I then created a new partition (type Linux Swap) to use up all the free space at the end of the disk. The new swap file is smaller than originally intended , but at least there are no incorrect partition entries. Its working fine now : well it appears to be!

IIRC I used fdisk to create the new partition, but managed to delete the original swap partition from the GUI "disk manager" application.

Cheers,
Hadyn

[drmarkb]

Thomas,

I dont mean to seem rude but how close are we to seeing V5? Any bugs to iron out before its ready for public consumption?

Mark

[Argon]

Another question: If shairport works on the Squeezeplug image, is it then possible to send audio (for example Youtube movie, but only the audio) directly from your Android phone to the Raspberry Pi and let it play?

[truehl]

Thomas,

I dont mean to seem rude but how close are we to seeing V5? Any bugs to iron out before its ready for public consumption?

Mark

Thanks for this question, you are right, I'm delayed! The last weeks I had been very busy and I liked to wait till the audio issues have been fixed. So audio seems almost fixed and some other thing also work right now. The last days I got Shairplay working with Raspbian and iOS 6. Today I got the last puzzle working it's forked DAAPD. So I'm almost finished, but I have to make some things a bit more usable. I hope I'm ready during the next 2 weeks! There are no showsstoppers left right now, but it's still a lot to do!

I hope I answered your question!

Greetings,
Thomas

[truehl]

Another question: If shairport works on the Squeezeplug image, is it then possible to send audio (for example Youtube movie, but only the audio) directly from your Android phone to the Raspberry Pi and let it play?

As far as I know Shairport only works with iOS device and not with Android! Correct me if I'm wrong!

[StephenR]

I realise Thomas is working hard for an easy to use release of Squeezeplug but I was hoping to get V5 test release going wireless in the meantime. V5 with network seems to work fine where v4 didn't.

Previously on v4 I used the below script to get going wireless.

Using this script
wget http://www.element14.com/community/serv ... 48-8-97488 r8712u_ko.zip
cp r8712u_ko.zip / && cd /&& unzip r8712u_ko.zip
apt-get install wireless-tools firmware-realtek
depmod -a
modprobe r8712u

I used apt get to enable unzip command which was the first problem but then got stuck with an error message "unable to locate package firmware-realtek"

Investigating I got a bit confused as to how I would solve the problem. Any ideas welcome.

thanks,

Stephen