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+--- Thread: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. (/showthread.php?tid=1218)
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Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - MysticDog - 03-27-2019
Greetings from the Mystic Dog! I am new to moode audio, having used it about a week now. I have some observations about my experience so far.
I initially tried runeaudio, who's interface I loved. What I wasn't happy with was the scaled-down operating system underneath it. I liked that moode audio is raspbian based. I couldn't even run MPC commands from the command line on Rune audio. So I thought I'd try moodeaudio.
I must confess, my first impression of the user interface was not positive, and it has gone downhill from there. But, an interface is just that, an interface. I will likely end up building my own anyway so liking it or not isn't that big of a deal. I do notice that the larger your playlist the more unresponsive the user interface is. My default playlist is 16000 songs long and I cannot even use the UI from my desktop. I understand from the little reading I have done that it is the size of the playlist loaded in the browser that is the issue. But I've noticed that MPC clients function just fine even with a large playlists. Is there something I'm missing about the default user interface? My default playlist is only going to get bigger.
My thoughts for dealing with it are as follows: I plan to write a shell script to run in the background that handles my actual playlist, while keeping the moode audio playlist only a couple hundred songs or so. I would run moodeaudio in consume mode and my background script would monitor the size of the playlist and when it got down to a certain size it would feed more random songs to the mood audio playlist. That would give me my random music from a collection of any size and hopefully a functional interface. what have others done in this regard?
While I enjoy listening to music I also like to keep current on the news. So my first project was to automate the playing of news through my moodeaudio player. I achieve this by running a script in the background that checks for the existence of an hourly newscast which I can download. When it finds n updated one the script downloads it to a directory I created on a ram drive just for this purpose. My script then gives the news file an adequate MP3 tag then inserts it into the playlist to play next. My script currently has MPD update the directory the news file is on, but I'm not sure that's necessary. Perhaps someone who knows more than I can clue me in on that.
I'm not entirely happy with how that process works out, but so far it does work. I get 5 minutes of news every hour mixed in with my music. If I don't want to listen to it I just hit next. I'd prefer to run some of these scripts from a cron event but I have not figured out how to get that to work yet. I create the appropriate crontab but it doesn't seem to be run. So currently I have a script that just sleeps a lot. Is there an issue with cron on this version of raspbian that moodeaudio runs on?
After setting this all up it occurred to me that others might also like regular news and there might be better ways to achieve this that already exists. If so, someone clue me in!
I currently have moodeaudio running on two devices. I put the beta 5 version on one device because I read that it had htpp streaming of the audio. I like this feature. I can play music on one end of my house in one device and listen to the same audio on the other end of my house through the HTTP streaming. The only problem is that the audio isn't synced and I have to keep the audio low enough that I can't hear them both at the same time, but as I moved from one end of the house to the other I don't notice it so much.
This brings up a question. Can that audio be synced? I have long enjoyed listening to music in every room of my house and have achieved this in the past bye putting an FM transmitter on the audio source and simply tuning in radios throughout the house to the channel. That sync the audio perfectly. Since my music collection in those days wasn't of higher quality than the FM transmitter wood put out it was a perfect solution. These days I would lose audio quality in the process so would prefer a better approach.
I remember reading about an Android app that synced audio over devices so multiple devices with play the audio in sync. I remember right, it's used the same algorithms that ntp clients have been using for decades. Such a project would be well above my abilities but it would be awesome if not only could we stream audio from one moodeaudio device to another, but that two or more such devices wood play the audio in sync.
Every time I mention things like this to people they tell me to just turn my audio up loud enough to hear it throughout the house. But if I do that it's too loud in one room and still not loud enough in another.
Anyway, once again, greetings from the Mystic Dog. These are my initial comments on moode audio and my initial experience with it. All in all I have a lot of positive things to say about it! Keep up the good work.
Mystic Dog
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - Tim Curtis - 03-27-2019
Hi,
Please edit your post and separate into paragraphs otherwise its impossible to read :-0
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - BackinBlack - 03-30-2019
16000 songs in a playlist? That would be a Library for many people!
Auto-shuffle works fine on Libraries with consume mode active to keep the apparent playlist down to 2 songs. Perhaps redefine your playlists as Libraries?
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - MysticDog - 04-03-2019
(03-30-2019, 08:23 AM)BackinBlack Wrote: 16000 songs in a playlist? That would be a Library for many people!
Auto-shuffle works fine on Libraries with consume mode active to keep the apparent playlist down to 2 songs. Perhaps redefine your playlists as Libraries?
I must admit I'm confused... (a fairly common occurence)
My understanding is that there is the library, playlists, and the current queue. The library is all songs in the database. The current queue is what MPD is playing from. Playlists are groups of songs from the library which can be added to the queue as desired. How do I tell MPD to Auto Shuffle the Library without adding the library to the current queue?
I am still pretty green at this whole MPD thing but this is how I understand it to work. What am I missing?
If it matters any, my main playlist is larger than the number of songs in my library. Every song in my library is in the playlist at least once, except for Christmas music which is in its own separate playlists. Some songs are in the playlist two, three, or more times, depending on how much I like that song. This way I get a variety of all my music but I hear my favorites a bit more often. As with everything else, I'm sure there's other ways to accomplish this, but my way seems to work for me.
I have found the answer to at least one of the questions I asked in my original post. That is regarding my hourly news clip I insert into my playlist. I inquired whether I needed to update that directory each time I put a new audio clip in there, and the answer is no. Because it has the same title and MP3 tag as it's already in the database, it plays just fine without updating.
-MD
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - jonners - 04-03-2019
(04-03-2019, 04:14 AM)MysticDog Wrote:(03-30-2019, 08:23 AM)BackinBlack Wrote: 16000 songs in a playlist? That would be a Library for many people!How do I tell MPD to Auto Shuffle the Library without adding the library to the current queue?
Auto-shuffle works fine on Libraries with consume mode active to keep the apparent playlist down to 2 songs. Perhaps redefine your playlists as Libraries?
Just clear the playlist, set auto-shuffle and turn it on. Press play.
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - BackinBlack - 04-03-2019
Sorry if you've already found this. Auto shuffle draws songs from the library, not playlists as it creates it's own temporary playlist played songs being deleted by the auto consume function.
Auto-Shuffle needs to be enabled in the Audio-Config page, Consume mode is enabled in the drop down menu (3 dots) below the volume control on the man page. Auto shuffle is started by the crossed arrows to the right of the 3 dot menu.
Ian
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - MysticDog - 04-06-2019
(04-03-2019, 08:26 AM)BackinBlack Wrote: Sorry if you've already found this. Auto shuffle draws songs from the library, not playlists as it creates it's own temporary playlist played songs being deleted by the auto consume function.
Auto-Shuffle needs to be enabled in the Audio-Config page, Consume mode is enabled in the drop down menu (3 dots) below the volume control on the man page. Auto shuffle is started by the crossed arrows to the right of the 3 dot menu.
Ian
I found it! But it doesn't seem to work? I admit, I only tried briefly. Does it draw from my entire library or can I configure it to only draw from certain parts? My Christmas music, along with a collection of audio discourses is also in my library, but not something I'd want played at random.
In my first post I mentioned syncing audio over multiple devices. I found snapcast and have been experimenting with it. My first impression wasn't favorable because constant hiccups in the audio. It was running on a device that had all kinds of crap going so I started fresh with a barebones install of raspbian and put the latest MPD server, built from scratch , and the latest snapcast on it, also built from scratch. I got that running just tonight, and so far, so good. I have two devices running running snapcast clients over Wi-Fi. There is an occasional hiccup, but the MPD on the server device is also updating my library, and I'm hoping that once it's finished it will be even smoother.
I have enjoyed my experience with moodeaudio. Other than my issue with the playlist in the web interface, I have nothing negative to say about it.
But I am moving in the direction of Bare Bones set up without a web interface. I haven't been happy with any of the web interfaces on any of the MPD projects I've tried. This isn't a comment about any of the projects, it is a comment about myself. I like extremely simple interfaces. The interface for the snapcast app is pretty simple if you've ever tried it.
I use an app on my Android devices which has simple self defined buttons you configure to do various task over SSH. I control my MPD through MPC using those predefined buttons. I think I will be very happy when it's all working to my liking.
I wish the moodeaudio community the best! MPD is awesome, and these various projects that incorporate it are a service to all. Keep up the good work!
-MD
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - DRONE7 - 04-06-2019
Quote:My Christmas music is also in my library, but not something I'd want played at random.
sad
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - MysticDog - 04-06-2019
(04-06-2019, 08:05 AM)DRONE7 Wrote:Quote:My Christmas music is also in my library, but not something I'd want played at random.
sad
Sad is editing what someone says before "quoting" them. Not cool.
-MD
RE: Greetings, I'm new to the Forum. - DRONE7 - 04-13-2019
(04-06-2019, 05:51 PM)MysticDog Wrote:(04-06-2019, 08:05 AM)DRONE7 Wrote:Quote:My Christmas music is also in my library, but not something I'd want played at random.
sad
Sad is editing what someone says before "quoting" them. Not cool.
-MD
What's wrong with Christmas music ??!!
