Multiple soundbridges accessing one or more mt-daapds

[rojbalc]

I’m planning to have multiple Soundbridges running in different rooms off my NAS – purely independent of each other, just accessing the same drive.

I’ve seen people mention that they’ve got several Soundbridges running, but haven’t found any information on whether these are accessing just one music database or more, all over 1 port or more, or much discussion of the general requirements for when you add an extra soundbridge into the equation.

Can anyone give advice on where to start and how to go about it, and what you can or can’t do?

My database(s) is on an MSS+, so I expect to be diving into the Big Linux Unknown again…

Any help/advice much appreciated!
roj.

[mas]

Setup:
– firefly latest nightly on a NSLU, deunderclocked.
– Debian OpenSlug-LE with ogg tremor patch in the transcoder (manual patch).
– Serving ca. 4k soungs from an AES encrypted ext3 fs.
– Samba, ntpd, sshd and the usual system daemons running on the NSLU. No other servers though.

– Soundbridge M1001 via LAN connected
– Soundbridge HomeMusic via WLAN/WPA connected

What works:
1. Both Soundbridges acessing an mp3 on the firefly server plus copying a file from/to the NSLU via samba or scp. No rebuffering.

2. One Soundbridge accessing an .ogg which is transcoded to wav and streamed. The other soundbridge accessing a .mp3. No rebufferings, works nicely. Accessing the harddisk on the NSLU via samba or scp in addition does lead to sporadic rebufferings via LAN. Heavy rebuffering when done via WLAN, which is more a WLAN capacity issue then.

3. Both soundbridges accessing an .ogg, so double transcoding required! Works with sporadic rebufferings, mostly going ok. This load is apparently at the edge what the CPU can do. Please note that the NSLU also has to decrypt the AES ext3 fs, so without the AES this would likely work without rebuffering, if only one of the streams goes via WLAN.

4. Accessing the same file on the NSLU at the same time is no problem. Playback just isnt synchronous then.

5. One Soundbridge playing from firefly and one an internet stream works also obviously.

6. I could not notice much difference when a background filescan was triggered via the webinterface. Except for 3. which rebuffers more then.

What should likely work:
1. Accessing the NSLU with up to 4 Soundbridges without transcoding involved. If you do away with the AES and strip down to minimum amount of processes running then I could imagine more are possible as well.

2. Three Soundbridges accessing mp3’s plus some file copies via samba should likely also work.

===========================

Quite impressive what is possible thanks to the lean design of the firefly server.

[rpedde]

@rojbalc wrote:

I’ve seen people mention that they’ve got several Soundbridges running, but haven’t found any information on whether these are accessing just one music database or more, all over 1 port or more, or much discussion of the general requirements for when you add an extra soundbridge into the equation.

Most of what it does is pretty lightweight. You might see browsing slowdowns, etc, but you ought to be able to run probably 5 or 6 clients of an MSS, assuming they are all native and not transcoded.

If you are transcoded, you’ll probably only get one transcoded file at a time.. depends on the type of file. Ogg is pretty cheap, and alac isn’t bad. Flac is pretty expensive. So while you might get two oggs transcoded at the same time, you probably won’t get two flacs transcoded at the same time.

Just serving up mp3 and aac files is pretty inexpensive, though.

Mas has a good summary there, and it seems pretty representative. De-underclocking is easy, though, so that’s probably worthwhile in any event.

— Ron

[richdunlop]

@rojbalc wrote:

I’ve seen people mention that they’ve got several Soundbridges running, but haven’t found any information on whether these are accessing just one music database or more, all over 1 port or more, or much discussion of the general requirements for when you add an extra soundbridge into the equation.

Can anyone give advice on where to start and how to go about it, and what you can or can’t do?

I’ve got three Soundbridges running off a single Firefly instance running on a deunderclocked slug. No problems with 320kbps MP3 streaming concurrently.

There’s nothing special you need to do. Just buy the Soundbridges and hook them up to your network. I have two wireless and one wired.

[jtbse]

@rpedde wrote:

If you are transcoded, you’ll probably only get one transcoded file at a time.. depends on the type of file. Ogg is pretty cheap, and alac isn’t bad. Flac is pretty expensive. So while you might get two oggs transcoded at the same time, you probably won’t get two flacs transcoded at the same time.

This thread made me curious. I’m running current nightly on a deunderclockded NSLU2 with two SoundBridges (not quite as fancy as RichDunlop with three 😀 ). Soundbridges are connected wired Ethernet 100mbps.

I’m currently streaming flac (transcoding to wav) to both of them, watching the NSLU2 with atop. Both are streaming flawlessly. On the NSLU2, total cpu utilization is 15% sys and 23% usr.

Not too shabby for my needs!

[richdunlop]

@jtbse wrote:

I’m currently streaming flac (transcoding to wav) to both of them, watching the NSLU2 with atop. Both are streaming flawlessly. On the NSLU2, total cpu utilization is 15% sys and 23% usr.

Not too shabby for my needs!

Wow. I expected a lot more CPU utilisation than that. Once I get a little further along with my FLAC rerip I’ll see if I can get the slug serving my 3 Soundbridges.

[sansp00]

It’s quite surprising how much it can handle … I stream 2 M1001, 1 R1000, 2 iTunes ( desktop + laptop ) from my little slug which also hosts a HTTP server and a SubVersion server.
Im getting way more out of it than I expected when I forked out the money to buy this. If all gadgets I bought where like this, I would be a happy man 😉
Patrick S.

[mas]

It’s quite surprising how much it can handle … I stream 2 M1001, 1 R1000, 2 iTunes ( desktop + laptop ) from my little slug which also hosts a HTTP server and a SubVersion server.

Wow that now even surprises me. I take it for a given that you stream without transcoding and that you use a lightweight webserver with mostly static pages. Apache/mysql is very heavyweight and could keep an NSLU busy alone if it find some users.

But well, then again I found some people who think that running any real encryption (as opposed to XOR) on a NSLU wouldnt be feasible.
And it clearly is. Even watching a movie from an encrypted share does work, though for high quality streams the 1.1 MB/sec limitation of the encryption would be a problem of course. But for music and such its no problem.

[sansp00]

@mas wrote:

It’s quite surprising how much it can handle … I stream 2 M1001, 1 R1000, 2 iTunes ( desktop + laptop ) from my little slug which also hosts a HTTP server and a SubVersion server.

Wow that now even surprises me. I take it for a given that you stream without transcoding and that you use a lightweight webserver with mostly static pages. Apache/mysql is very heavyweight and could keep an NSLU busy alone if it find some users.

Yup, no transcoding, lighthttpd with straitfoward pages, nothing fancy. I tried MySql and Apache, too big for what I wanted to do … I may try other web servers and probably a database server also down the road, but since I use the slug as a part time toy, part time server, I don’t mess it up too deliberately 🙂
One things for sure, if they could put out another little bugger a bit more powerfull than this one at a good price, Im all in !
Patrick S.

[rpedde]

@sansp00 wrote:

@mas wrote:

It’s quite surprising how much it can handle … I stream 2 M1001, 1 R1000, 2 iTunes ( desktop + laptop ) from my little slug which also hosts a HTTP server and a SubVersion server.

Wow that now even surprises me. I take it for a given that you stream without transcoding and that you use a lightweight webserver with mostly static pages. Apache/mysql is very heavyweight and could keep an NSLU busy alone if it find some users.

Yup, no transcoding, lighthttpd with straitfoward pages, nothing fancy. I tried MySql and Apache, too big for what I wanted to do … I may try other web servers and probably a database server also down the road, but since I use the slug as a part time toy, part time server, I don’t mess it up too deliberately 🙂
One things for sure, if they could put out another little bugger a bit more powerfull than this one at a good price, Im all in !
Patrick S.

I’ve got a hacked-up version of micro_httpd that I’ve shoehorned php cgi support into — that way I can run a full php web server from inetd. Zero memory overhead, works great. It actually runs surprisingly quickly, too. I tried lighty, but it was too fat for how infrequently I used the web server.

If you are interested, I’ll post patches.

— Ron

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