ionno but ...

I installed it following the instructions, choose a folder to share, and waited a while, icon was green in the systray...
i went to my roku m2000, and tried to find the firefly library, but i could only find my 2 itunes libraries ( got 2 PCs sharing on itunes )

stephq wrote:

I installed it following the instructions, choose a folder to share, and waited a while, icon was green in the systray...
i went to my roku m2000, and tried to find the firefly library, but i could only find my 2 itunes libraries ( got 2 PCs sharing on itunes )

If you are on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (and using Microsoft's firewall), did you explicitly add firefly.exe as an Exception in the firewall configuration applet within Control Panel?

On my PC here, the Firefly server did not auto-configure the firewall upon installation and also the firewall didn't pop up when Firefly started the first time allowing me to add the exception easily. If you are using a different firewall product on your music server PC you will probably also have to explicitly permit Firefly within it.


ted.h.

epete wrote:

Probably asking too much, but will this server support streaming live audio feeds from an Audio Card Line Input to the Roku? I am still looking for some simple software that can do this.

Probably not in the near term. I'm going to be building out a plug-in infrastructure, though, so hopefully others will jump on building inputs and outputs to the thing to make it more flexible.

In the meantime, you should be able to do something like this already pretty easily using shoutcast + winamp. http://www.shoutcast.com/download/serve.phtml. Just use the line-in input from winamp, and point your soundbridge at the machine you load the shoutcast server at.

Voila.

-- Ron

Ted Harper wrote:

stephq wrote:

I installed it following the instructions, choose a folder to share, and waited a while, icon was green in the systray...

If you are on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (and using Microsoft's firewall), did you explicitly add firefly.exe as an Exception in the firewall configuration applet within Control Panel?

...

ted.h.

Yup, that's almost certainly it. Next build will fix the firewall on install.

-- Ron

rpedde wrote:

Next build will fix the firewall on install.

New builds at http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org add exceptions to the firewall.

-- Ron

rpedde wrote:

Something I just noticed in doing an upgrade installation (ie not uninstalling the "beta 1" build first) was that the configuration file is left with the plugin directory as ".", even though the updated rsp.dll is in the new plugins subdirectory.

Nice catch. I'll fix that in the next installer version so it doesn't bite someone. Turns out this time didn't have any effect, but should really be fixed. Thanks.

I just installed the latest nightly (svn-1018) and the config file (on my Win32 machine) was updated by the installer to include "plugin_dir = plugins", BUT I found this didn't actually resolve correctly when the server was started up - the RSP protocol was not being shown to the Soundbridge (only the DAAP one was shown as being available to connect to).

I manually changed the entry in the connect file to "plugin_dir = .\plugins" (don't know why that would be a difference) and restarted Firefly, and then I DID correctly see both the RSP and DAAP versions of the library being available for selection on my Soundbridge. Maybe the config file change didn't make the difference (I don't understand why it would), but if that isn't the reason the RSP DLL wasn't loaded earlier, maybe when Firefly does a full-scan startup (I had deleted the database to force a rescan) it doesn't do the plugin startup?

Anyway, whatever the reason, it seems to be showing RSP to the Soundbridge happily now, even though it wasn't on the initial startup after the upgrade.


ted.h.

[quote]
I manually changed the entry in the connect file to "plugin_dir = .\plugins" (don't know why that would be a difference) and restarted Firefly, and then I DID correctly see both the RSP and DAAP versions of the library being available for selection on my Soundbridge. Maybe the config file change didn't make the difference (I don't understand why it would), but if that isn't the reason the RSP DLL wasn't loaded earlier, maybe when Firefly does a full-scan startup (I had deleted the database to force a rescan) it doesn't do the plugin startup?
[/plugin]

Nope, it should have worked like that. Strange, as mine was modified in the same way and worked okay.

I'll take another look and see if I can replicte that.

rpedde wrote:

I manually changed the entry in the connect file to "plugin_dir = .\plugins" (don't know why that would be a difference) and restarted Firefly, and then I DID correctly see both the RSP and DAAP versions of the library being available for selection on my Soundbridge. Maybe the config file change didn't make the difference (I don't understand why it would), but if that isn't the reason the RSP DLL wasn't loaded earlier, maybe when Firefly does a full-scan startup (I had deleted the database to force a rescan) it doesn't do the plugin startup?

Nope, it should have worked like that. Strange, as mine was modified in the same way and worked okay.

I'll take another look and see if I can replicte that.

I've just had it happen again (this time with "plugin_dir = .\plugins", so that isn't a factor in when it does/doesn't happen - good!)

Anyway, it seems intermittent, but the twice it has happened to me, this is the scenario (running on Win XP SP2):

1. Stop Firefly service.
2. Delete songs.db
3. Start Firefly service (so that a full rescan and rebuild of songs.db is performed)
4. After rescan is finished, on the Soundbridge only the DAAP version of the Firefly-served library is visible, not also the RSP one.

NB: This is NOT always repeatable, and has only happened twice out of maybe 10 times I have done the sequence above, but it has ONLY happened on a restart which is also doing a full scan. Stopping/starting the Firefly service again when the problem happens has so far always made the RSP version of the library visible on the Soundbridge. NB: Maybe the full scan isn't a factor; it isn't reproduceable enough for me to be able to say for sure, but definitely sometimes after Firefly startup the RSP version of the library is _not_ being shown to the Soundbridge, whereas the DAAP version has been available every single time, no matter what.


ted.h.

schiers wrote:

Hi,

will there be a Linux version?

BR Carsten.

I'd be way stoked if it could run on my 'new' Emachine running FreeNAS on a 250G drive!

Sounds interesting:
- 2 questions -

1) Is firefly/daap/rsp mutually exclusive with upnp? I run multiple media players off twonky and would like to continue to do so. Maybe I need to run twonky for upnp and firefly for roku?

2) Does firefly support "now playing" like twonky? This means I can queue up a load of songs on the roku and then pick them up (with delay ) on other devices/pcs. Sort of like a local shoutcast.

3) Doh! Will the answers change in the future?

Guy

guysivey wrote:

1) Is firefly/daap/rsp mutually exclusive with upnp? I run multiple media players off twonky and would like to continue to do so. Maybe I need to run twonky for upnp and firefly for roku?

You can definitely run Twonky and Firefly together on the same server and serving the same library of songs. I use Twonky to serve a DLink DSM320 (and will also be serving an XBox360 when I get around to buying one) and Firefly to serve my Soundbridge - because Firefly is so much faster than Twonky. My server PC isn't a monster either, only a P3 666Mhz, but fortunately both Twonky and Firefly are efficient on runtime memory requirements and CPU use. NB: This is on a Windows server PC (XP SP2); I don't know if it is different for the other supported platforms, but it should be ok, as the ports and protocols used are different.

2) Does firefly support "now playing" like twonky? This means I can queue up a load of songs on the roku and then pick them up (with delay ) on other devices/pcs. Sort of like a local shoutcast.

I don't know but it sounds like a good idea. You can pick up the now playing information from the Soundbridge (via RCP protocol) regardless of the server, but I think right now you'd have to write the glue code yourself to watch for a change and send the new track to play to the other (UPnP-based) players.

Much as I like Twonky, and I do use it for serving video files and pictures to my DSM320, I'd love to see a UPNP plugin for Firefly at some stage, so that for music-only playback I could use just Firefly for both my UPNP and Soundbridge player devices (then just start up Twonky when I actually wanted to serve video or pictures, which is only a small part of the time).


ted.h.

iTunes, WMC 2.0, Firefly all co-exist for me. Twonky, too... but I rarely use it due to it's limitations/bugs.

I don't know but it sounds like a good idea. You can pick up the now playing information from the Soundbridge (via RCP protocol) regardless of the server, but I think right now you'd have to write the glue code yourself to watch for a change and send the new track to play to the other (UPnP-based) players.

This could be efficiently done with multicast. Synchronization might be hard, if you wanted lock-step playing from multiple devices, but it would be doable.

Much as I like Twonky, and I do use it for serving video files and pictures to my DSM320, I'd love to see a UPNP plugin for Firefly at some stage, so that for music-only playback I could use just Firefly for both my UPNP and Soundbridge player devices (then just start up Twonky when I actually wanted to serve video or pictures, which is only a small part of the time).

I gave some thought to this -- if the interface is abstracted enough, there is no reason that a upnp output plugin couldn't be attached. That would be post 1.0, though.

-- Ron

Thanks for the replies. Sorry about more questions, but I haven't been able to find Firefly documentation for answers. Maybe there is wider interest in these issues anyway.

Q1 - Can Firefly use the iTunes xml db (like Twonky does) instead of scanning 1000's of files to create its own db? It always seems such a waste for servers to be crashing around in the data when metadata already exists.

Q2 - If so, and the iTunes db changes, can Firefly update its db when told to, while still serving, without crashing or having to be restarted (unlike Twonky)?
Regards,
Guy

doesn't look like it does... http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7678

Guy