[GLLUG] streaming music

[Charles]

David Singer wrote:
> I have all of my music (about 150GB) on a P3/512MB Ubuntu Server 8.04 
> box in the other room. I typically work on my Laptop Core 2 Duo/4GB 
> Ubuntu 8.04 (either 100Mbit or Wireless). I was wondering if anyone knew 
> a good solution for playing my music off my P3 Server on my Laptop. I 
> have tried samba mounting my music folder with the following script:
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> smbmount //192.168.43.41/music/ <http://192.168.43.41/music/> 
> /home/david/Music/ -o username=david,password=mypassword (192.168.43.41 
> is my P3 server)
> 
> This works to access my music (a mix of mp3/flac) but it skips when I 
> play it with VLC/Songbird/every other media player iv tired. I can of 
> course copy some of it to my files to my local disk and play it fine 
> from there but this a huge pain and i would really like to be able to 
> use Songbird to create play lists / organise my files.
> 
> I was hopping someone might have found a good solution for remotly 
> playing music (preferably with Songbird). I googled a bit with no 
> success. Optionaly i would like something that would work with Movies as 
> well but i could live without this. Some sort of ACL would be nice as 
> well since there are other poeple on my network i would like to give 
> read (but not write) access to.

A couple of suggestions...

1. Check your media player settings and see if there are any options for 
buffer size. If so, increase them. Bear in mind that a samba share 
mounted with smbmount is going to be seen by the application as a local 
disk, not a network resource. I don't know whether songbird has settings 
for this, but I'd be surprised if VLC didn't.

2. Edit smb.conf on the server and set the "socket options" parameter, 
particularly the SO_RCVBUF and SO_SNDBUF options. I don't know what the 
defaults are, but almost everyone sets these to 8192 or higher. You may 
have to do some tweaking to find the best options for you. See the 
smb.conf man page for more info. Here's mine:

    socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

3. See if there's something on your network you can optimize. Maybe one 
of your ethernet ports somewhere failed to autonegotiate and got stuck 
at 10Mbps half-duplex. You can use ethtool or mii-tool to check for 
that. What's your average speed when pulling down a huge file? I have an 
Athlon 750MHz as my Samba server and get at least 7MB/sec.

4. Look into some other streaming solution. MPD (Music Player Daemon) is 
one option, but I've heard that it can be temperamental at best. VLC is 
supposed to do streaming to and fro. Ampache is some kind of web-based 
streaming audio thing that I've always wanted to try but haven't gotten 
around to.

Charles
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