mpdPup - Simplified MPD Music Server/Jukebox - v0.9.3

[kocozze]

...Wow Idolse!
Now it's all ok! There's only two little fixes to make:
At the boot end, mpd don't start automatically.
And the pressure of poweroff button don't activate the shut down procedure (it turn off the pc "brutally"!).
It is possible to fix those?
And it is possible to activate suspension instead of poweroff with the power button pressure?
Many thanks, really...

[ldolse]

At the boot end, mpd don't start automatically.
And the pressure of poweroff button don't activate the shut down procedure (it turn off the pc "brutally"!).
It is possible to fix those?
And it is possible to activate suspension instead of poweroff with the power button pressure?

Hi kocozze, glad we're making progress. Regarding MPD not starting, did you change the location of your music directory from /mnt/music? The MPD init script checks to see if that directory has content in it before starting MPD to prevent your music library from possibly being deleted.

Regarding poweroff - this is by design. mpdPup runs from RAM and is designed to be turned off 'brutally' as you say. You only need to shutdown safely if you have changes to the configuration you want to save, for this just log in and issue the 'poweroff' or 'restart' command. Making the power button and suspend work is technically possible, but not something I'm particularly interested in because it requires extra daemons running to manage that logic.

Hi Idolse,

I hope you don’t feel uncomfortable (or may be even offended) by me pointing at the difficulties when trying too test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick.

Situation 1:
When booting from a freshly made MPD-PUP USB-stick (with Lili) I got this error:
Finally I decided to unplug the SSD (thus avoiding this error).

Situation 2.
Problem 1: * Where too put music-files when the USB-stick is attached too windows?
Problem 2: How too point too the /test-directory inside the configuration wizard?
Problem 3: How too play a wav-file from USB-stick?

Would it be of any help, if I wrote a short How-To test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick? (too placed at the end of the Installation/Upgrade chapter)

Hi Mark, I really appreciate the detailed feedback and enthusiasm, and no offense taken. Regarding your very first issue Situation 1, with mpdPup failing to load when an SSD was plugged in, this shouldn't have happened, and sounds like an upstream bug in Puppy Linux on the surface. This is the first I've heard of this problem, if other users are seeing the same thing I'd like to get to the bottom of it, but it may be unique to your hardware, as I know a number of other users boot off of USB with an internal SSD.

As to Situation 2, you're running into all these issues because I never considered this use case for mpdPup, and between your contribution and some of the other discussions the last few pages I'm seeing more and more validity in supporting this type of scenario to enable completely self contained testing from the USB stick.

As to your specific questions there, problem 1 - this could be anywhere, but we need to define a canonical location that will be used in future versions - I think a folder on the USB stick called 'audio' or 'music' would be appropriate.

For problem 2 - I can't actually point to a specific directory on the USB stick, at least not during the first boot. The stick is invisible to normal user space during the very first boot. I think instead of having the wizard point to it I may just need a third option in the drive configuration allowing to choose to use the USB stick instead of NAS or other local storage. This is because Puppy Linux uses the boot device/stick in a fairly specialized way even after the first boot - it's not treated like a normal drive, it's filesystem is under /mnt/home.

For problem 3 - essentially what I plan to do is create a symlink in the music library folder to /mnt/home/audio (or /mnt/home/<whatever directory on the stick>). This will also require that I change the default music directory from /mnt/music to another directory, e.g. /var/music. At that point I can create symlinks to all available music locations - e.g. /mnt/home/audio, /mnt/music/nas, /tmp/ramdisk, etc, etc. This has been suggested in the past but this is the first time I've seen compelling reasons to make that change. mpd.conf would need to be changed to follow symlinks if it's not already.

If you wanted to do this yourself today you'd need to do the above manually, create a new music library root such as /var/music, then symlinks to the audio directory on your USB stick. I think the number of changes required for a typical end user may be too much if you were thinking of writing a guide, but you could try it and decide for yourself. Regardless, I'll make this a priority for the next release and see if I can get it out sooner rather than later.

[Jean-Louis P]

Hi Idolse

Good to have you back, and still very responsive and helpfull as usual, much appreciated.

When I think about Mark comment, he says he wants to be a kind of representative of "Windows users". It's me too.

The problem I feel is these guys and myself do not know a thing about symlink and Linux File structure and we get very easily lost in there as we want to listen to music and do not spend the time to learn the file system... I know its bad

Maybe a small didactic § on that would help ?

Jean-Louis

[kocozze]

kocozze wrote:
At the boot end, mpd don't start automatically.
And the pressure of poweroff button don't activate the shut down procedure (it turn off the pc "brutally"!).
It is possible to fix those?

Idolse write
Hi kocozze, glad we're making progress. Regarding MPD not starting, did you change the location of your music directory from /mnt/music? The MPD init script checks to see if that directory has content in it before starting MPD to prevent your music library from possibly being deleted.


Hi Idolse,
the location of music directory is already /mnt/music. I don't know why mpd don't autostart at boot-up. There's another way to do this?
For the shutdown with power button, at the new reboot mpdpup says "Improper shutdown..." and several rows of warnings. At the end it says "File system chek completed...press enter to reboot"
It no looks good!!
Thanks

[juliocat]

Hello Idolse

Great sound!!!!!!!!! is just fantastic, congrats.

The installation with the wizards make everything very easy to setup, thanks for this.

I just have one problem, i can't point my music directory to my Mac SMB shared folder, is this posible??
for now i'm using a NTFS usb disc, is exFat support planned??

Thanks

[ldolse]

Great sound!!!!!!!!! is just fantastic, congrats.

I just have one problem, i can't point my music directory to my Mac SMB shared folder, is this posible??
for now i'm using a NTFS usb disc, is exFat support planned??

Hi Juliocat, glad you like it. Regarding SMB, Apple broke SMB sharing when they released OSX Lion. They dropped the open source Samba project and replaced it with their own proprietary implementation. Unfortunately this implementation only seems to work with recent Windows Operating systems and nothing else. In order to get SMB working again you need to install Samba - unfortunately this is not at all easy, but there are a number of tutorials on how to get it done.

I'll look int exFAT, if someone else has written a driver for it then it should be doable.

the location of music directory is already /mnt/music. I don't know why mpd don't autostart at boot-up. There's another way to do this?

You're going to need to give me a lot more information then, MPD is supposed to start automatically. Let me know why you think it isn't running, how long you're waiting, and what exactly you're doing to make it start. If it's not running try typing this:

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/20.mpd start

For the shutdown with power button, at the new reboot mpdpup says "Improper shutdown..." and several rows of warnings. At the end it says "File system chek completed...press enter to reboot"
It no looks good!!

These messages don't matter, you can ignore them - it's just some Puppy Linux error checking that is inapplicable to mpdPup, at some point I need to remove it.

[juliocat]

Thanks Idolse

I do a search about Samba in OSX Lion, and yes apples replace it with his own implementation, but someone has already do a simple application to reinstall open samba, the application is very good and works!!!

http://eduo.info/apps/smbup

[Magellan]

Hi again folks.
I have been running MPDpup for some time now and I think it is just excellent. Now I am going to buy a new minimal PC and use this PC for MPDpup and music only.

The problem is this. I have found an very nice Atom driven PC, consuming just about 6 watt. Problem is I want to disable USB ports not in use, since I have read somewhere the USB:s ought to be reserved for the DAC - without anything else disturbing this connection. Unfortunately the PC don´t accept Compact Flash or SD cards. (Only miniSD, which are almost gone from market). An alternative would be to install a SSD, but it is kind of overkill I think, and it requires an permanent harddisc install. I could use a SATA to Compact Flash adapter, but it will almost be the same cost as a small SSD.

Any recommendations?

I also want a low power overhead, and I don´t know if there is any difference between an SSD and an adapter with an CF. Do anybody else know?

If installing an SSD, is the TRIM issue anything I have to take concern off, or does it not matter due to the small amounts of data written?

Thanks in advance

[ldolse]

Hi Magellan, CF-SATA adapters are $15 bucks USD on Newegg. $10 more for a new CF card. Smallest SSD runs around $50 there, but could be cheaper sources. The SSD will definitely get you faster boot times, but not much else for the extra dough. Not sure what the power difference would be, both should be quite low. For the price difference I'd probably go with the SSD if I was assembling a system today, just because I could also check out the claims about SSD vs. NAS on audio quality.

I don't think you need to worry about TRIM, writing to disk is extremely infrequent.

[Magellan]

Hi Magellan, CF-SATA adapters are $15 bucks USD on Newegg. $10 more for a new CF card. Smallest SSD runs around $50 there, but could be cheaper sources. The SSD will definitely get you faster boot times, but not much else for the extra dough. Not sure what the power difference would be, both should be quite low. For the price difference I'd probably go with the SSD if I was assembling a system today, just because I could also check out the claims about SSD vs. NAS on audio quality.

I don't think you need to worry about TRIM, writing to disk is extremely infrequent.

Thanks. By the way. Are there anyway I could donate to you for your work with MPD-pup?

[Magellan]

[quote="ldolse"For the price difference I'd probably go with the SSD if I was assembling a system today, just because I could also check out the claims about SSD vs. NAS on audio quality.
[/quote]
I am rather skeptical about the idea that onboard storage would be better than NAS. But this is just my guess. I suspect the complete absence of a hard disc makes a better improvement since you then get rid of the electrical activity generated by the traffic to and from SSD. Anyway, here is some thoughts written on the subject. Observe it is recommended to put the HD outside the computer and fed by its own power supply. It is about a traditional HD though, not an SSD Se #10. http://www.cicsmemoryplayer.com/index.p ... P.Headless

[ldolse]

No hard disk is logic I've always subscribed to as well, but after seeing several users claim to hear a difference I must admit some mild curiousity. Not enough curiousity to run out and buy a SSD, but I also want to simplify the Puppy Linux install scripts for internal hard disk/SSD, so testing is another excuse

As to donations, I appreicate the offer. I'm not really in this for any money, but I can also see value in a donation kitty for to fund new equipment for testing purposes, I'll think about how to go about it.

[jrling]

Re SSD - I may be completely wrong technically, but surely:
Once the Linux OS has loaded (into RAM) and if you use 100% load into memory setting in mpd.config
both mpdPup and your Playlist are fully loaded into RAM and so the SSD will not be accessed at all whilst music is actually playing?
That is my experience anyway, as I can see that my SSD (with music library on it) never is accessed during play as it has a red light that flashes when it is reading or writing - and it deosn't.
Further, I thought one could actually take the Linux OS USB stick out of its USB socket once booted without affecting anything? Only required if you have your Save file set to be on the USB stick?

I too would be pleased to donate towards ldolse getting an SSD (for testing purpose!)

Jonathan

[luisb]

Put me on the list
Luis

[ldolse]

Re SSD - I may be completely wrong technically, but surely:
Once the Linux OS has loaded (into RAM) and if you use 100% load into memory setting in mpd.config
both mpdPup and your Playlist are fully loaded into RAM and so the SSD will not be accessed at all whilst music is actually playing?
That is my experience anyway, as I can see that my SSD (with music library on it) never is accessed during play as it has a red light that flashes when it is reading or writing - and it deosn't.
Further, I thought one could actually take the Linux OS USB stick out of its USB socket once booted without affecting anything? Only required if you have your Save file set to be on the USB stick?

The OS itself is loaded 100% in RAM - provided your music library isn't on the USB stick you could indeed remove it from the system after bootup. Doing that would also restrict you from updating the MPD database or using albumber or mpd-sima (updates to those files are written to disk automatically). The mpd.conf setting only loads 100% of whatever your buffer is set to, not your complete playlist. I'm not sure if the 100% setting will buffer multiple tracks if for example you set a 700 meg buffer for 80 minutes of CD quality audio. I'll have to do some more testing with it, my new NAS provides network monitoring which might help clear up the behavior.

Appreciate the additional donation offers - will update everyone when I figure out a workable system - pledgie might do the trick.

[kocozze]

kocozze wrote:
the location of music directory is already /mnt/music. I don't know why mpd don't autostart at boot-up. There's another way to do this?

Idolse:
You're going to need to give me a lot more information then, MPD is supposed to start automatically. Let me know why you think it isn't running, how long you're waiting, and what exactly you're doing to make it start. If it's not running try typing this:
Code:
/etc/init.d/20.mpd start

Hi Idolse, i type your code but nothing is changed. Mpd don't start automatically at boot-up:
- don't appears "starting mpd"
-when i try to connect mpdroid it says "server not running and reachable..."
-when i type "mpd", all is fine

[ldolse]

Hi Kocozze, are you definitely running 0.9.3 or 0.9.3a? The older version 0.9.2 had an issue on some platforms which didn't like launching mpd with 'nice'. I removed this logic in 0.9.3.


For other interested parties, I did some experimenting with MPD's buffer today. It seems to me that there may be a bug which prevents buffers larger than ~120,000 KB to be specified, if I specify 130000 and above I get an MPD error.
Anyway 120,000 KB is around 13-14 minutes of CD quality audio. I set a buffer fill of 2% - I personally don't like 100% because this breaks Internet Radio and makes it slow to switch between albums/tracks.

Here's what I discovered:

• MPD only keeps the current and next track in the buffer
• First and Second track are buffered on initial playback
• Next track is buffered at the very beginning of each track

The above was based on interpreting network/disk activity graphs on my NAS - to confirm this 100% I unplugged the network from the MPD machine after buffering for track 4 was completed (but before track 3 had finished playback). MPD completed playing track 3 and moved along to track 4 with no problem. I restored the network around halfway through track 4 and MPD picked right up and immediately buffered track 5.

I also tested with the buffer fill set to 100% - the biggest difference in that case was that you would need to wait until the first track (and possibly the second) was fully loaded into memory before playback actually began. The graphs more or less looked the same.

[kocozze]

Hi Idolse, i have the version 0.9.3a...

[jrling]

Looking back at various postings on WaveIO issues:
===============================================
Sounds like you're running into the same unmute issue. It's not WaveIO specific actually, it could affect a number of different components, it's just most common with the WaveIO. The root cause is that devices with a space in the name aren't unmuted.

There is one small issue remaining – the waveIO is not detected by pup unless it is powered up after the mpdpup is started . The mute issue was fixed as per post 2 and stays OK.

I don't have any idea if this is an Linux problem or a problem with the WaveIO itself.
===============================================

ldolse - I wondered if:
1. You had any further findings on the boot up problem that I have with WaveIO? Similar to described above?
2. If the fact that the WaveIO has a space in its name could also be responsible for erratic boot behaviour as well the 'Unmute' issue?
3. Is there any permanent way of fixing removing the space in the name in a config file or programmatically, that might fix one or both issues?

Clearly quite a few of your users are running with WaveIO - not surprising as it is really good and inexpensive.

[ldolse]

I think I know the cause - kocozze, when you said you installed to the hard drive, do you know what type of install you did? I'm wondering if you did a full install instead of a Frugal install. If you did this you're not running in a read-only RAM environment, you're running in a full Linux install.

Please type this command at the CLI:

Code: Select all

grep 'PUPMODE=' /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE

Let me know what it says. It should say 13, but if you did a full install it would give you a different number. My recommendation would be to install frugally, but you could also edit the startup script:

Code: Select all

nano /etc/init.d/20.mpd

Change the number 13 to whatever number was displayed with the first command.

@Jonathan, this isn't related to the WaveIO problem - although he did have a related issue before I believe we've moved past that. I have a fix for that issue, but it needs to wait until the next release.