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Internal server details

Posted by John Swenson (A) on April 30, 2010 at 16:59:54

In Reply to: What didn't you like about your experience with the Squeezebox Touch? posted by orpheus on April 30, 2010 at 06:34:49:

If you use it with an external server it works very well, there are a lot of issues with running the internal server with a USB HD attached.

The Touch just barely has enough memory to run the player software and server software at the same time. Anything which uses any more memory will push it over the edge and kill it.

The general usage model with an external drive is this:

the first time you plug the drive in it will do a "full scan". This scans all the files on the disk and determines which are audio files and cover art files and which are not. Then it goes back over the audio files and reads every one of them building a database on the disk of all the songs and tag information. This is the same process as happens on an external server, but the big difference is that since there is so little extra memory on the box it has to write the info to the database file very frequently, thus the disk is constantly seeking back and forth between the music files and the database files. It works but is very slow.

Then it goes and looks for your artwork files. From these it builds another database cross referencing songs to artwork, AND resizes the images to match the size it will need on the screen. If you have large artwork files this can take a long time and can cause the Touch to run out of memory.

After all that is done you now have a disk that is ready to be used in the normal way. At this point I recommend ejecting the drive (from the home menu) and unplugging it, rebooting the Touch and plugging the drive back in. Many people don't do that step and that can cause lots of problems. The scan step can use up all the resources on the machine and it usually works quite a bit better if you reboot before trying to use it as a player.

From now on each time you plug in the drive it will do a quick scan of the disk looking for new files. It compares each file with its database, if they are not in the DB or have been changed since the last scan they are "deep scanned". This is much faster than a full scan but can still take 15 minutes or so with a very large disk. Then its ready to play music.

At this point it works normally, unless you try and do something which takes extra memory or CPU such as running animated screensavers (the infamous VU meters, spectrum analyzer, picture viewer etc), anything like that can cause it to grind to a halt and cause stuttering or extra long time between tracks etc.

There are also general limitations of the internal server: it doesn't have a web interface and it cannot load pluggins. For some people this doesn't matter but for others its a major deal breaker.

The people that are having the biggest problems are running libraries with large numbers of songs (40,000 to 60,000). If you are in that range I wouldn't even bother with the running off a USB drive, its going to be a very frustrating experience. There are a number of people in the range of 30,000 songs that have no problems at all and are quite happy running off the internal server. Others in that range are having big problems. Below 20,000 songs seems to work well for almost everybody as long as you are willing to live with the limitations.

What frequently happens is people try and hurry through the initial process. It IS possible to play music by going directly to the folder and file without a full database. Many people that have problems try and use this to listen to music while the scan is happening. This of course uses more memory and the scan crashes. Others try and watch pictures off flickr or a SD card while the scan is happening, again this messes up the DB. Once this happens the DB file is corrupted and you need to delete it before trying again, there is a menu item for that (wipe and rescan), but most people haven't figured that out and try and rescan with a corrupt DB which just gets them into more trouble.


The internal server DOES work as long as you live within its limitations and don't try and push it too hard.

My personal recommendation is: don't use the internal server unless you HAVE to. Using an external server on a real computer gives you so so many more options, libraries scan much quicker, you don't have to "baby it along", its just a much nicer experience.

If you don't want to use a "regular computer" as the server, get a VortexBox, it comes with the server already installed, has 1 or 2 gigs of disk, has an optical drive for ripping and dedicated software for controlling it all. If thats even too much you can get a micro VortexBox, which is REALLY tiny and only takes 5 watts. The internal drive is only 500G, but you can plug in USB drives if you really need 2 gigs of file storage.

My experience? I only have a library with about 15,000 songs, the internal library works fine with this. It takes about 1/2 hour to scan. After that plugging in the drive takes about 3 minutes for the update scan. Everything works fine. No problems with playing music, even using the VU meters etc.

Sound quality? Streaming PCM from an external server still sounds quite a bit better than anything else. Playing music from the internal server (either wav or flac) sounds about the same as streaming flac from an external server. I always have the external server transcode the flac files to PCM for streaming to the Touch, this is quite a bit better than anything else. There are some slight differences between playing a wav and flac from the internal server, but once you've heard PCM from an external server its hard to go any other way.

John S.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.

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