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Hello,
First of all, i want to thank this community and certainly hismastersvoice for creating & supporting this software.
I was quiet surprised of the functionality and possibilities of MS4L and the integration with LMS.
This post is share the experience I had during the installation.
HW-setup:
- I5 3570K, on a asrock Z99 extreme4 motherboard, 16GB of RAM. (overkill I know, but we might install other services later on)
- Asus Xonar AE 7.1 PCIE soundcard
- 6 chan amplifier connected to 12 speakers (stereo per channel) installed in the house
We tried multiple things before getting it to work properly.
The first step we tried, was making a virtual debian 10 machine (vmware player) with MS4L 0.7.4. Installation went smoothely, the configuration did not. We followed the guide provided (awesome guide btw!), but the players just would not start. We selected the only soundcard available in the VM (the ASUS XONAR AE), with 8 channels but it just did not work.. So we gave up this idea. We suspected an issue with virtualisation.
The second step we tried was installing a dedicated debian installation on the same hardware, with the same MS4L version. We tried AGAIN choosing the ASUS XONAR AE 8 chan sound card (tried both sampling rates 44.1KHz & 48KHz), but the squeezelite players just would not start. We tried also enabling and disabling the onboard audio (like sugested in the guide), but did not have any influence on the result.
That's the point we ALMOST gave up, and we started to bruteforce the settings in order to see what could finally make it work. The setting that did make it work was the selection of only 6 channels out of the 8 of the Xonar AE soundcard. Poef, the players started, and I could create 3 players (3 channels of my amplifier). Very strangely the players started, but the amplifier did misteriously not receive any signal out of player 2 & 3 (channel 2/3 & 4/5 of the soundcard). We tried connecting all possible outputs of the soundcard, it just did not work. Only the "headphone" output of the soundcard gave a sound output.
It felt like MS4L selected the wrong audio card, like only the "headphone" was usable for some reason (i am no expert but i suspect that for debian there are 2 kind of devices, the "stereo/headphone" device and the "7.1 surround" device and MS4L could not choose the second one). (i do not have the support data any more of this configuration, you will understand later on why).
After a lot of troubleshooting (and trying changing a lot of settings), something (i cant tell anymore what exactly) went terribly wrong and it all broke. I did try to reinstall using the install script, but he did not reinstall MS4L because MS4L allready (or still) existed. I did not know at that time the exact location of the MS4L configuration files (/opt/music_server).
So i made a clean debian10 installation, just to be sure and used the beta installation script (v1.0.6), and kept onboard audio disabled.
Installation went like a charm, beta installation was succesfull and the soundcard was directly detected. I don't know if following the following steps helped (https://wiki.debian.org/PulseAudio) of changing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, default-sample-channels = 8.
The zones were easily created (much more userfriendly then 0.7.6, great job guys!!), and the 4 outputs work like a charm!
We got courageous and enabled onboard audio, maybe that would work as well as a second soundcard. This would avoid buying a second sound card (6 Chan amplifier and 8CHAN soundcard > creating only 4 stereo chan). MS4L detected the onboard audio, and i got those players running as well, hurray!
So now we had sound, we went configuring LMS. Spotify & airplay plugin loaded and configured very easily. We tought, top, job finished everything is working fine, let's call it a day.
Then something strange happened, the CPU got stuck at 100% usage and memory climbed to 14GB. This is not normal after 5 min audio playback. After a good night of rest, and new hope, i disabled all unnecessary LMS plugins (internet radio's, and such) restarted the system, and problem was solved.
Minor bugs discovered:
- we noticed that only the last created player could be deleted from the web interface (don't forget to add that in the manual please
)
- DON'T change the language settings directly from the GUI. We did that, and i think there was no language file and that make the WebGUI unusable (white screen), reboot did not help. We had to delete /opt/music_server and reinstall to fix it. (probably there are more elegant ways to fix it)
- strange stuff at boot: mstools line 52 & 59 "[: ==: unary operator expected" but did not make it stop to work, so we ignored it for now.
- strange stuff in configuration data, we renamed a zone (ZONE 6 > "KEUKEN") but both are visible in the configuration data (ZONE 6 is not visible in LMS or MS4L dashboard, only KEUKEN is visible as a player)
[EDIT] This fenomenon has disappeared
conclusion: this was a fun project, and we are using this currently in the house, works like a charm. Next step for us is the integration with the Loxone mini server. In hindsight we could have tried again the virtualisation of debian 10 with the 1.0.6B software, because the 0.7.4 just did not work for us.
Bonus request:
We have a hard way to make all players (or all audio channels) play the same song at the same time. Yes i can "synchronise" players with LMS, but that is not what we want. We wonder how it would be possible to make an extra "parent" player that will play music on a selection of "child" virtual players. I don't know if that is possible or feasible, but that is certainly an intresting feature for the future.
If there is another workaround, feel free to help us.
First of all, i want to thank this community and certainly hismastersvoice for creating & supporting this software.
I was quiet surprised of the functionality and possibilities of MS4L and the integration with LMS.
This post is share the experience I had during the installation.
HW-setup:
- I5 3570K, on a asrock Z99 extreme4 motherboard, 16GB of RAM. (overkill I know, but we might install other services later on)
- Asus Xonar AE 7.1 PCIE soundcard
- 6 chan amplifier connected to 12 speakers (stereo per channel) installed in the house
We tried multiple things before getting it to work properly.
The first step we tried, was making a virtual debian 10 machine (vmware player) with MS4L 0.7.4. Installation went smoothely, the configuration did not. We followed the guide provided (awesome guide btw!), but the players just would not start. We selected the only soundcard available in the VM (the ASUS XONAR AE), with 8 channels but it just did not work.. So we gave up this idea. We suspected an issue with virtualisation.
The second step we tried was installing a dedicated debian installation on the same hardware, with the same MS4L version. We tried AGAIN choosing the ASUS XONAR AE 8 chan sound card (tried both sampling rates 44.1KHz & 48KHz), but the squeezelite players just would not start. We tried also enabling and disabling the onboard audio (like sugested in the guide), but did not have any influence on the result.
That's the point we ALMOST gave up, and we started to bruteforce the settings in order to see what could finally make it work. The setting that did make it work was the selection of only 6 channels out of the 8 of the Xonar AE soundcard. Poef, the players started, and I could create 3 players (3 channels of my amplifier). Very strangely the players started, but the amplifier did misteriously not receive any signal out of player 2 & 3 (channel 2/3 & 4/5 of the soundcard). We tried connecting all possible outputs of the soundcard, it just did not work. Only the "headphone" output of the soundcard gave a sound output.
It felt like MS4L selected the wrong audio card, like only the "headphone" was usable for some reason (i am no expert but i suspect that for debian there are 2 kind of devices, the "stereo/headphone" device and the "7.1 surround" device and MS4L could not choose the second one). (i do not have the support data any more of this configuration, you will understand later on why).
After a lot of troubleshooting (and trying changing a lot of settings), something (i cant tell anymore what exactly) went terribly wrong and it all broke. I did try to reinstall using the install script, but he did not reinstall MS4L because MS4L allready (or still) existed. I did not know at that time the exact location of the MS4L configuration files (/opt/music_server).
So i made a clean debian10 installation, just to be sure and used the beta installation script (v1.0.6), and kept onboard audio disabled.
Installation went like a charm, beta installation was succesfull and the soundcard was directly detected. I don't know if following the following steps helped (https://wiki.debian.org/PulseAudio) of changing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, default-sample-channels = 8.
The zones were easily created (much more userfriendly then 0.7.6, great job guys!!), and the 4 outputs work like a charm!
We got courageous and enabled onboard audio, maybe that would work as well as a second soundcard. This would avoid buying a second sound card (6 Chan amplifier and 8CHAN soundcard > creating only 4 stereo chan). MS4L detected the onboard audio, and i got those players running as well, hurray!
So now we had sound, we went configuring LMS. Spotify & airplay plugin loaded and configured very easily. We tought, top, job finished everything is working fine, let's call it a day.
Then something strange happened, the CPU got stuck at 100% usage and memory climbed to 14GB. This is not normal after 5 min audio playback. After a good night of rest, and new hope, i disabled all unnecessary LMS plugins (internet radio's, and such) restarted the system, and problem was solved.
Minor bugs discovered:
- we noticed that only the last created player could be deleted from the web interface (don't forget to add that in the manual please
)- DON'T change the language settings directly from the GUI. We did that, and i think there was no language file and that make the WebGUI unusable (white screen), reboot did not help. We had to delete /opt/music_server and reinstall to fix it. (probably there are more elegant ways to fix it)
- strange stuff at boot: mstools line 52 & 59 "[: ==: unary operator expected" but did not make it stop to work, so we ignored it for now.
- strange stuff in configuration data, we renamed a zone (ZONE 6 > "KEUKEN") but both are visible in the configuration data (ZONE 6 is not visible in LMS or MS4L dashboard, only KEUKEN is visible as a player)
[EDIT] This fenomenon has disappeared
conclusion: this was a fun project, and we are using this currently in the house, works like a charm. Next step for us is the integration with the Loxone mini server. In hindsight we could have tried again the virtualisation of debian 10 with the 1.0.6B software, because the 0.7.4 just did not work for us.
Bonus request:
We have a hard way to make all players (or all audio channels) play the same song at the same time. Yes i can "synchronise" players with LMS, but that is not what we want. We wonder how it would be possible to make an extra "parent" player that will play music on a selection of "child" virtual players. I don't know if that is possible or feasible, but that is certainly an intresting feature for the future.
If there is another workaround, feel free to help us.
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