Sunday 15 January 2012

Logitech Squeezebox Controller

This app is the official one from Logitech and it's free. It's great for a free app. It has the basic functions:
  • Start/Stop/Play/Next/Previous
  • You can put together playlists
  • Control the volume
  • Search you music library
  • And it also displays the album cover


If you have installed the Youtube plugin you can also use it via this app. It is located in "My Apps".
You can also control each Squeezebox separately if you have multiple ones.
When you start it, the Logitech logo is displayed for about 1-3 seconds. It's a little bit annoying, but it's free :-)

You have some kind of split screen. on the left hand there is the media library where you can browse, and on the right hand there is allways the player. If you have smaller screens, like on my mobile phone, you can forget this app. Although it changes the layout when using it upright. You can see this in the below screenshot. This is the default screen.



In the following screen you can see who it looks when browsing through your music library. You have a small alphabet where you can jump the the according Artist.



When you click on the player name on the right side you get the menu where he searches/lists other Squeezebox-players.


Remote control your Vortexbox

When you just control your vortexbox from your computer in my mind it isn't necessary to have such a box, because you can use a media player installed on the computer instead. You can connect a IR receiver to the VB and control it somehow with a remote. But I think this is a very outdated method.

I use a 7" Android Tablet instead. There are several apps available for controlling the Squeezebox Server. I've installed the 2 most common ones:

The Tablet is a very cheap one from Archos. I already have it for nearly one year and it still works great.

I also have an Android mobile phone, which I also use sometimes to control SB. But only when the tablet is too far away and I'm too lazy to get it.  :-)

Monday 2 January 2012

Restart services on CLI

Fedora has an own command to restart daemons, it's called service.
The syntax is very easy:  

service <service name> start | stop | status

The following list shows the most important services with a short description.

DescriptionSerice Name
Auto CD Rippervortexbox
DAAP (iTunes) Server      forked-daapd
DLNA Serverminidlna
Samba Serversmb
Logitech Media Serversqueezeboxserver
VortexBox Playervortexbox-player