Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd. - Support Forums and Community

Okay. I feel stoopid. :-(

I've watched the Tuts and How-to videos. Read the threads for iTunes, JRiver, SC, SC Renderer. And I've tried to check out people's setups to understand how to get CQC to play music.

It can't be this hard.

I've got a ton of questions, but they all build toward something very simple. I've got a ton of music sitting on my WHS Server (which is also my CQC server.) I play it with SAGE on my TVs, with my Denon 3808 in the media room, or at individual computers using either iTunes or VLC or MediaPlayer. It's all MP3. It is all organized in Artist/Album/Disc# folders.

I want to be able to play this music on my HP ThinClient in my kitchen using the CQC touchscreen as my controller.

I guess I just don't get this "server/client" relationship for playing media. It is sitting on an accessible net store, why can't CQC just play it like SageTV?

Is it as hard as it seems, or what am I missing?!

1) I can't figure out what the two different Squeeze Center drivers are for. I'm guessing on is to control the server, the other is to control the players?
2) When I try the File Metatag Repository, it says it has loaded hundreds of items, but nothing is visible in the browser in either image or text. But when I click on a box, it tries to play something.
3) Which brings me to an error I get with every machine I try to use the CQC Audio Render on, I get a "Can not setup filter" error. I'm choosing DirectShow, and I know that I have DS filters available. What do I need to do to get CQC to play using DirectShow?
4) The iTunes Repository only shows a couple of collections. I guess my library is that screwed up? Wow, that's pretty harsh. No offense, but other media player don't choke on my collection as is. Why does CQC have to handle it so inelegantly?

Thanks for any advice.

It's more frustrating than anything I've tried with CQC (and other stuff like lighting, weather, my component control are all going well.) I luv my CQC, but this something of a disappointment. Again, could be simply user error. So any wisdom would be appreciated!

I will offer what insite I can. First you will need to associate the data with a media repository, CQC has a great one built in, I am not sure though how to get this data into the built in repositoy when it is already a mp3. You can also use an external repository like jrivers. Ether way you will need to load that repository up and create a interface for it. You can build a Q&D one by going to new template and puting a premade Media Browser interface on.

From there you will need to setup a device for the player, Again there is an internal one that I am unfamiliar with. You can use the internal one which works well with the internal repository. You will need to setup this device on the computer or zone you want to be playing the music.

From here it is a bit of coding to get it all sqaure .. Im not good enough to offer specific code advice but I beleive the above is the approx path you will need to folow to get what you want done working.

Ted

Micco Wrote:Okay. I feel stoopid. :-(

1) I can't figure out what the two different Squeeze Center drivers are for. I'm guessing on is to control the server, the other is to control the players?

There is only one SqueezeCenter driver (but a few different versions) and it can control all aspects of your music from selecting music to play from the SC database to controlling the players that are connected to the SC server. There is also a SlimServer driver which is included in the released drivers. SlimServer is the previous name of SqueezeCenter for pre 7.x versions of the server.

Thanks all. I'm trying the iTunes Repo again. I'm making some progress, as my original Q&D interface using auto created browser was evidently broken. I suppose in my "stretching" it to fit my larger screen I broke some connection. When I built a new one the iTunes Repo starting populating it appropriately.

jkish Wrote:There is only one SqueezeCenter driver (but a few different versions) and it can control all aspects of your music from selecting music to play from the SC database to controlling the players that are connected to the SC server.

I guess I was confused by the driver thread and the how-to thread for the Squeeze Center driver. Told ya I felt stoopid...

So are most people using iTunes to somehow feed SqueezeCenter Server, then using CQC to send commands to the SC server? I get sense that people aren't happy with the SoftSqueeze player. So I should use the iTunes Repo to feed the SqueezeCenter server driver? I think that might be where I was confused.


It all seems like a very complicated way to point a simple audio player at a file and have it send the output to specific audio port.

Micco Wrote:So are most people using iTunes to somehow feed SqueezeCenter Server, then using CQC to send commands to the SC server? I get sense that people aren't happy with the SoftSqueeze player. So I should use the iTunes Repo to feed the SqueezeCenter server driver? I think that might be where I was confused.


It all seems like a very complicated way to point a simple audio player at a file and have it send the output to specific audio port.

I used to use the JRMC repo, and just loaded it into CQC, and used my M-Audio multi-port sound card for playback. Easy peasy.

But my wife wanted the ability to create playlists for both her iPod and see them from within CQC, so I moved to using the SC driver. SqueezeCenter can import iTunes, so iTunes manages the library, and SC is just a hoover. The upside is that if you have a physical Squeezebox (not Softsqueeze), it can also play online Sirius or Pandora. (i only have sirius). I tried SoftSqueeze, hated it, wouldn't stay up reliably. And that wasn't even bringing CQC into the mix.

Sounds a lot more complex than it is. Once someone walks you through it, it's not too bad. But it is damn powerful.

If all you have is just some mp3 files and you don't care about creating playlists offline, either use JRMC or the CQC File Repo.

Thanks. That begins to clarify things a bit. I really wanted to use the CQC Audio Player, since I'm getting the output from my HP 5730 Thinclient.

But no matter which PC I use as the local, I get the following error:

Is this referring to the filter graph on my server, my client, or is there some tertiary error that is causing that error message (that has nothing to do with the codecs?)

EDIT: I think I might I realized the problem...can the CQC Audio Player actually render .mp3? Or only .wma?

Is D: a shared drive? If so, you can't use that. The player is running as a service, not in your logged in account. Shared drives are a per-Windows account thing. So the audio player driver doesn't understand wat D:\ is probably. You will need to make the data available through a directory share, not a shared drive. Directory type shares are no specific to user accounts.

Doh! That's it. Thanks.

Of course, pulling that off in the virtual drive space of Windows Home Server might be tricky. It looks like that drive has a Net Share name of Music. So do I need to point the iTunes library at that name so that the Repo gets the right vector? Or do I make the switch somewhere else?

EDIT: I think I got it. I just needed to point the iTunes Library at the Music: netshare when I imported the folder rather than D:/share/music. It would have been much easier to do it that way initially anyway! Leave it to me to do it wrong and go to extra effort to get it that way...

Well, not so easy after all. I have the iTunes library pointed at //server/iMusic, which is a new net share I created. But they still get translated to D:/shares/music in the call to the CQSL Audio Player.

So if anyone has any ideas how to get iTunes to point to the right spot on a WHS system I'd appreciate a shout.

Did you reload the repository? It won't see the changes until you do that.