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Winamp, FLAC and media players

In earlier posts, I have mentioned switching to using Winamp as my main PC-based music player and deleting all my MP3 files and re-ripping my CD’s in the FLAC format. I have not regretted those two decisions. Having all my audio in a loss-less format means I can switch to another format at any time without losing anything other than what the other format loses. So if I convert from FLAC to another loss-less format at a later time, at least I won’t have to rip all the CD’s again. I still like Winamps media library and the ease with which you can create new “views” is great.

In the original post about ripping all files to FLAC, I did worry a little bit about the iPods and other MP3 players sprinkled throughout the home.

That challenge turned out to be a non-issue. Winamp supports “Plays for Sure” devices like the iRiver as well as iPods and it is quite simple to configure it to convert non-supported file-formats into another supported format on the fly as the files are transferred to the MP3 player (transcoding). So the PC’s used by those family members with iPods use Winamp to automatically transfer whatever audio we want whilst on the fly convert the FLAC files to AAC, and the lone iRiver has audio files converted on the fly to MP3. It obviously takes longer than transferring files that might already be in a format supported by the relevant media player.

Winamp does have “out-of-the-box” support for iPods, but I have installed ml_ipod which has enhanced iPod support. For example it can transfer cover art onto the iPod if it is present on the server.

What has not worked so well is getting the D-link DSM-320 media player to play. The version of TwonkyMedia I have is supposed to (like Winamp) be able to transcode from FLAC to another format, but I haven’t had that work reliably.

I’ve played around with TVersity which was somewhat better, but still not that reliable when transcoding. Unfortunately it is a Windows program and the home server runs Linux. I tried installing TVersity in a VMware image where the OS was Windows. That image works fine when the VMware image runs on Windows host. I installed the VMware player on the Linux server. The Windows image with TVersity seems to run fine, but the D-Link media player can’t locate it. It is most likely a routing issue. The Linux server probably needs to be configured to forward multicast (which uPnP uses, and the D-Link media player uses uPnP). I’ve tried to configure the forwarding of multicast, but without success. So at the moment the D-Link media player is idle.

I have considered buying the Netgear EVA8000 which on paper looks like it does most of what I want from a media player. There are seemingly many things to like about it, but specifically it supports FLAC files natively, and it can get access to files on any fileserver supporting SMB (which a Linux machine with Samba does), so there would be no need for either TVersity or Twonkymedia. So why haven’t I rushed out to buy it? Too many comments from existing owners about things that don’t work well, and the price is a bit high. For not much more I can buy something like the AOpen miniPC.

Linksys WAG300N

My ADSL modem died on me on recently. For two months my BT supplied ADSL connection had become worse and worse. The modem was loosing the signal several times a day. The statistics page of the X-Modem M3 from ADSL Nation seemed to imply that it was the ADSL connection. I even had BT check the line and they suggested lowering the line speed. And then I lost the connection again and the modem couldn’t connect again. I finally got suspicious and tried the USB ADSL modem I was originally supplied with, and guess what, no problems with the ADSL line at all.

So this time I bought a combined router, switch, access point and ADSL modem. I don’t really like that combination, I prefer the ADSL modem to be separate, but the X-Modem M3 is the only true Ethernet ADSL modem available for the UK market (as far as I know). I decided to go for a device with 802.11n (draft).
I once had a Netgear ISDN router; firmware updates ended very quickly and support was not good. I bought a Linksys WRT54G some years ago and it just keeps working and working, and even though Linksys seems to have end-of-lifed it as far as firmware updates go, the firmware updates did continue for quite some time. So I chose the Linksys WAG300N.

I’m afraid it will be returned though. It has performed well, but:
It has an On/Off button. The other day there was a short power cut and the WAG300N did not switch back on by itself, I had to press the on/off button when power had come back on. I run several services on a home server (which comes back on automatically after a power cut), so the ADSL modem has to come back on its own after a power cut as well.
There are no ADSL statistics. You could argue that the ADSL statistics are of little use as I couldn’t use them to figure out what was wrong with the deceased ADSL modem, but at least I could see that something was wrong. So I want some statistics.

On the positive side: It was extremely easy to get working with the ADSL connection, and one big plus point with me is that it supports SNMP out of the box.