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
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
