Is there any good, free remote controllable streaming software that runs on x86....

[SuperDerpBro]

.... that is not Daphile or Volumio? I dislike both. Been using Daphile/material for quite some time now. There's always something I don't like about it going on. It's also borderline torture to navigate it's options.

I have many tiny PCs and don't want to buy a Pi, heh.

Cheers

 

[Nisse10000]

I think you can use Plexamp for free

 

[Fahzz]

Logitech Music Server.

Edit: Logitech Media Server.

 

[Apesbrain]

It seems the nature of these things that there is always "something I don't like" going on. That said, Daphile (LMS) is about as solid as it comes. The current issue with Daphile, though, is that it is stuck on an old version of LMS and shows no signs of being updated.

What issues are you having?

 

[somebodyelse]

Logitech Music Server.

That's what daphile uses almost unmodified - OP apparently doesn't like it. Volumio uses MPD but with more wrapping around it - it would be useful to know what's disliked to know whether another MPD based system might be suitable or not. Most of the Pi alternatives use either LMS or MPD. I'm not aware of any player software that works on Pi but not on x86.

There are a few other UPnP options, but I don't get on with UPnP/DLNA so haven't looked at them too closely.

VLC can be controlled by browser or mobile app. Clementine has a remote app.

 

[Philbo King]

I use Winamp with a wireless keyboard. Probably not great for a system with no display though.

 

[SuperDerpBro]

Volumio is ugly. LoL. There were some other reasons, but its been quite a while. I'm going to be trying it again tonight though.

It's many small things that I do not like about Daphile/Material skin.

At it's core, it works well. It also sounds great. However there is always something that bugs me every single time I use it. Yesterday I spent a few hours listening to music, and these things were annoying..

1. The info plugin. Maybe 1/4 of the 100s of artist pictures were incorrect. Could not figure out how to change the image of even one of them. Still cannot. I could view all of the artist pictures in Daphile. Just not change it.

2. The artist/album info is often very wrong. NFI how to edit it.

3. Trying to try out some eq plugins (lol). Took a while to even find the setting after installing a plugin. When I did find them, I could not get it to work at all.

4. Navigating the options. Bugs me every single time I use it.

5, Felt slightly slow and clunky at times.

Last time I used it there where other things. Next time I use it I will have more reasons. Everything is just super user unfriendly, and it is very hard to quickly find answers. If at all. Diving into many, massive old threads, reading for an hour and then still having no idea. Fun times

Maybe its all PEBKAC, but it makes music "un-fun" every time I use it. :/ heh

Wish MoOde wasn't Pi only.

From the replies I gather the answer to my original question is, no. heh. I will try to Daphile harder!

 

[fatoldgit]

regarding artist photo's... dredging stuff of the web will not get you a good experience.

Just like cover art (where 90% of dredged ones are crap), you need to curate these manually.

I have lots of older artists whose only photos are black and white so I standardized on B&W for all artist, modern or otherwise (just converted colour to grey scale)

I also, being anal, tried to get photos of them in concert. Sometimes, the only decent photo was a canned publicity shot or for bands again it was a publicity shot cause no photo of the band in concert was decent.

For some bands (like say Savoy Brown) you only needed the main member (Kim) cause the other members were too fluid to matter.

I also tried to get photos of the artist at their prime..I would rather see a fit young Peter Green than the old, bloated one (due to the drugs needed to literally keep him sane)

Below is a sample of my curated artist images. Sure it takes a while.

So with any LMS based software, you can nominate the dir with the artist photos.. if the artist name is "Savoy Brown" just need say "Savoy Brown.jpg" to have it come up

NOTE: these are from my Blues Genre drill down and yes Snowy White did do some pure Blues albums

Here is the same thing under the material skin:

 

[SuperDerpBro]

I do all of my covers and artist images manually. I am very meticulous about my tags and art. None of the artist photos show up. It picks whatever it wants from lastfm and its often very wrong. GHOST DATA is not DMX last i checked LOL

I see no way to change them. Even if it is not wrong, why not allow the user to pick the one he/she likes? It even shows you ALL of the ones available from lastfm.

Tried Volumio tonight. Not as bad as I remember. However, It is doing the same things with artist image. A bit more accurate. But I cannot change them.

I am also hearing a LOT of micro pop/crackles in the music. No idea why :/

EDIT: Wait, are you saying i have to have a separate folder with an image for each artist? I will try this.
EDIT2: Back to Daphile.. cannot get wifi to work. Setup unchanged.. "sigh*
EDIT3: After fighting with Daphile to see my network share for an hour (took 3 seconds in Volumio) I was able to set this...

Putting artist photos in the artist photo dir works! Thanks. I will just add the ones that are borked, or dont like, as i see them. Hope it changes them if there already has been one selected.

EDIT3: It does not change pictures that have already been selected. The new ones show up in the viewable pics but the ones chosen at the start remain in all lists. *sigh*

 

[fatoldgit]

I do all of my covers and artist images manually. I am very meticulous about my tags and art. None of the artist photos show up. It picks whatever it wants from lastfm and its often very wrong. GHOST DATA is not DMX last i checked LOL

I see no way to change them. Even if it is not wrong, why not allow the user to pick the one he/she likes? It even shows you ALL of the ones available from lastfm.

Tried Volumio tonight. Not as bad as I remember. However, It is doing the same things with artist image. A bit more accurate. But I cannot change them.

I am also hearing a LOT of micro pop/crackles in the music. No idea why :/


View attachment 356939


EDIT: Wait, are you saying i have to have a separate folder with an image for each artist? I will try this.
EDIT2: Back to Daphile.. cannot get wifi to work. Setup unchanged.. "sigh*
EDIT3: After fighting with Daphile to see my network share for an hour (took 3 seconds in Volumio) I was able to set this...

View attachment 356974

Putting artist photos in the artist photo dir works! Thanks. I will just add the ones that are borked, or dont like, as i see them. Hope it changes them if there already has been one selected.

EDIT3: It does not change pictures that have already been selected. The new ones show up in the viewable pics but the ones chosen at the start remain in all lists. *sigh*

ok

if you change any images, tags etc you need to do a rescan for it to stick the new image/tag in the database.

 

[SuperDerpBro]

Of course. I did that, and restarted, twice. No change. Until a few hours later.. the pics are now different in stock daphile. but not in Material. Material shows the old ones.

 

[somebodyelse]

Seems like a bug - report at https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material/issues and there's a good chance it'll get fixed.

 

[bluefuzz]

that is not Daphile or Volumio? I dislike both.

Have you tried Kodi? It works best if you can attach a screen (preferably a tv) to your streamer but there are good apps for phones and tablets if you want to control it that way. I used Kodi (and before that XBMC) as my primary music streamer for many years and would still prefer it over Moode/Volumio or LMS.

With regard to cover art/artist photos and general metadata I find all music streamers/servers, whether commercial or open source, suffer from wrong/incomplete metadata due to it mostly being 'crowd sourced' from the likes of Musicbrainz and Discogs. I use Bliss to organize my cover art and metadata, but there is still quite a bit of manual editing if you want it 'perfect'. But once organized I haven't noticed any problems in that regard specific to LMS ...

 

[SuperDerpBro]

I haven't used XBMC since the Xbox was relevant, heh. Thanks for the suggestion. Trying to keep this headless, for now anyways.

The pictures are now showing up in Material. Not sure why they were not before *shrug*

Everything seems to be working they way I want now! woohoo.

Still kind of shocked there are so few options for PC.

 

[bluefuzz]

Trying to keep this headless, for now anyways.

As I said, Kodi can be made to work quite well headless if you want. It's come a long way since the Xbox.

Still kind of shocked there are so few options for PC.

I think most of the options available on Linux ARM devices are also available for X86/AMD64 processors. If you mean Windows then that's really the wrong tool for the job IMO ...

 

[SuperDerpBro]

Yea, I've seen its development over the years. Just never had any use for it. I play all video VIA MPC-HC/BE with MadVR. Clunky, but amazing quality renderer. Now that I think of it. I think i actually may have tried XBMC once.. attempting to get it to use MadVR but I failed, heh. Guess, i could give it a try for audio only.

Which options are these? This info is why i started this thread

By PC i meant x86/64.

 

[somebodyelse]

Did you try a web search for linux and upnp or dlna? You should find at least 5 options quite easily. I'm sure there will be more other remote controllable media players too if you look - I just checked for remote control for the first couple of media players that came to mind.

 

[SuperDerpBro]

Of course i searched. There are tons of random media apps, and the like. I only found 2 that were dedicated to audio quality, and had a clearly stated way of bypassing whatever OS's audio "stack," and were remote controllable with no screen .. So I came to ask the Audio Scientists. If you know of one, why not just tell me? Instead of gatekeeping.

 

[SuperDerpBro]

Spent a few hours really trying to learn how to use Daphile. I like it a bit more now.

The only problem I really have with it now is that it sometimes forgets to use replay gain, lol. Randomly (rarely) a track will play without it. All of a sudden my stereo is 9+ db louder. Not the end of the world, but quite annoying, heh.

Usually it happens when going from a track without RG, to a track with. I don't RG vinyl rips. Everything else I have locally is.

 

[StigErik]

I used LMS for a loooong time, but the last couple of years I’ve been using KODI. Why?
- Can run on Windows and Linux (and more)
- Support for both video and audio
- Supports every codec known to man (almost)
- Can play surround sound formats, including SACD ISO
- Great remote apps for various platforms
- Can play from folder structure, just like LMS
- Can do passthrough audio. Useful if you want your AVR or DAC to decode stuff like DTS or DSD
- It’s free