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 But I think this is a very outdated method.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 officially Logitech Squeezebox Controller (free)
•  Squeezebox Commander (a few Euro in the market)

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.  :-)

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.

Description	Serice Name
Auto CD Ripper	vortexbox
DAAP (iTunes) Server	forked-daapd
DLNA Server	minidlna
Samba Server	smb
Logitech Media Server	squeezeboxserver
VortexBox Player	vortexbox-player

Share a folder from your Vortexbox

If you need some additional shares except the default ones (music, movies, pictures, files) just create them. Only a few steps need to be done, and it only takes a few minutes. Before making any changes to smb.conf backup the original one.

1. Add a new section to the smb.conf
   Connect to the vortexbox with SSH and open smb.conf with an editor.
   
   e.g:

   nano file /etc/samba/smb.conf

   
   
   add following section:

 ###### Share for temporary data sharing #########
[Sharename]
path = /home/trash
guest ok = yes
writeable = yes
# create mask = 0777


explaination:

[Sharename] - the name of the share, it can be different from the diretory name
path - path to the directory on OS layer
guest ok - everyone in the network can access the folder
writable - it's writable for everyone in the network
create mask - permissions for "owner", "group", "other" as typically on Linux OS. 777 means that all 3 groups have "read", "write", "execute" permissions. default value is 744. Note: in my example it is uncommented



2. Reload smb.conf and restart smb daemon



service smb reload
service smb restart

Youtube Plugin - Bad Youtube URL

Today I also recognized a problem with the youtube plugin. When you paste a URL to a youtube video it displays "Bad YouTube URL". It neither works when entering the original URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zovedef1oIU nor when you try to add it like this youtube://zovedef1oIU

In the slimdevices forum other users allready posted the problem. I hope it will get fixed soon.

Thread can be found here: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=87731&page=11

Upgrade to Vortexbox 2.0

Last week I updated my Vortexbox to the new Version (2.0). But I had some troubles.

At first I tried the direct update from fedora 14 to fedora 16 according to the tutorial. I updated to Logitech Media Server (LMS) 7.7.0, cleaned up the /boot directory, but after downloading the preupgrade file for fedora 16 there was still
not enough space on /boot although the partition size was 485 MB.

As I allready made a backup of my music library I decided to install VB 2.0 completely new from CD. This worked fine and only took 15-20 minutes. But after the first time booting the LMS 7.7.0 wasn't installed. So I had to install it manually.

 
yum clean
yum update
yum reinstall logitechmediaserver

Now everything seemed to work fine until I imported my music collection. LMS 7.7.0 has a problem with pictures stored in some mp3 tags. After some research in the VB forum I found a solution that seems to work up to now. It's the update to LMS 7.7.1 rc1. The official update to 7.1.1 should be available next week when I remember correctly.

Update (11. december 2011): After a restart of the VB I have the same problem as before upgrading to RC1.

I've found a solution now that works for me. After the VB booted, I have to stop vortexbox-player and Logitech media server (service still called squeezeboxserver). After that, start LMS again and vortexbox-player.

 
service vortexbox-player stop
service squeezeboxserver stop


service squeezeboxserver start 
service vortexbox-player start 

Log files / Navigating on Commandline

When you have problems with your system, you will need to have to search through the log files. Maybe you find the problem for you own, or have to search for help in a forum. In both cases it's necessary to study the log files. Usually the location of logfiles on Linux systems is /var/logs. Also on Fedora (Vortexbox).
Some useful log files are:

• When upgrading vortexbox, the logfile you see on the webinterface is located under:
  /var/log/vbupgrade.log
  
  
• Any loginfo of the Squeezebox server is stored in the sbs log-files. There are a couple of them located under:
  /var/log/squeezeboxserver
  These log files were very useful for me when I had the problem with the Youtube Plugin.
  
  
• If you configure a samba share, and the config file has an error, you can see the log in this file:
  /var/log/samba

 
This brings me to an idea for the next post. A short simple guide, how to add a samba share to your vortexbox.

If you need some help in Linux command line navigation, following links are helpful:
Edit files on command-line
Navigate through directories