HS/FS MP3 player integration in Homeserver

[Stefaan]

Hi all,

My name is Stefaan and I live in Belgium, since my German written language skills are even worse than my spoken German, I will be posting on this forum in English. I hope this is not a problem?

I am looking for a good solution (= enough features and good looking) to integrate a multiroom MP3 player solution in to the homeserver. I know this has been discussed in this forum, but I haven't found a real solution.

So, did any of you succeed into creating an MP3 player solution (with playlists)? What did you use as hardware (squeezebox, sonos, russound, barix, ...).

I know that DaCom have some kind of integration (HSSlim, HSRuss and Barix), but they do not support playlists, CD cover art, etc. What I am looking if for a more complete solution.

If you did not integrate it with the HS, maybe somebody found a nice solution to have them live together on the same touchscreen in a nice way?

Thank you,
Stefaan

[MatthiasS]

Welcome!

I' m using two different solutions. I started with Barix gold many years ago and switched to Slimdevice. My Squeezebox 3 is used daily, actually i bought a Squeebox Boom for the bathroom.

I do not use HSSLIM, I just have realized On/off/volume etc over the HS visu. To choose a speial playlist, I you HSBROWSER from Alfred. This tool creates an IE-popup without frames, shwoing the (original) Squeezecenter.

The perfect solution (with covers and very fast ipod access) is m..myhome. I'm using this solution in combination with my HS, and all i can say is: brilliant!

http://www.elektronik-innovativ.de/index.php?prod4

[Stefaan]

Thank you for the answer, and thank you for using English :-)

If I understand correctly, you have two solutions:
- With squeezeboxes
- with m..myhome

Are these two systems coupled? Is the squeezecenter in any way connected to the mac solution?

I think that using the original squeezecenter with the popup already gives a very nice solution, but I will ook into the m..myhome some more.

[Hightech]

Hi Stefaan!

I will just take the chance to test how good my written English is ;-)

As Matthias quoted, m..myhome is a brilliant solution - although I do not use it (not yet ;-) I got first impressions while reading on their homepage and here in the forum. And it really looks great. The main developer (meudenbach) is active in this forum, too, and so many suggestions made by users of m..myhome here in the forum do their way into one of the next releases!

I tried to realize it with a squeezebox as Matthias, too. HSSlim gives you the chance to choose playlists, artists and albums. But you only have 5 items per list, so if you media has a few hundred artists it may take a while to find the right one (i.e. there is no chance to search for a special artist). Also there are no covers. Meanwhile my squeezebox is not longer connected to my network!

After that I searched for a solution with itunes as I normally use itunes as mp3-player and think it as all the functions you need to navigate through your music.

First: My solution is not totally integrated into the HS. But it works fine:
- I run itunes in the background on my visu client, the sound is connected to the multirooum receiver (via a Fritz WLAN repeater which has digital and analog sound outputs)
- on the same visu client runs hsexit (www.hardcopy.de/hs) which has the function FOREGROUND. This function is used to get the window of any application on the client on top (similar to the way Matthias gets his squeezecenter on top)

So on the media page in the visu there is a button which sends <FOREGROUND "itunes"> - now itunes is on top, I have all the functions of itunes and after choosing a song, artist or playlist it is just one click on the task bar and the hsclient is on top again.

The main disadvantage: I can only do this from that one visu client, where itunes runs.

Another solution which looks nice is a visu on the ipodtouch/iphone and remote for navigating your itunes on a media pc next to the audio receivers

Regards

Olaf