LMS on latest ReadyNAS products?

Shardstrat wrote:

I'm beginning to think that the problem lies with LMS itself .... What if sell the Squeezebox Touch (they're fetching high prices right now) and get a Wandboard or a CuBox or a Beaglebone and a touchscreen to go with it, and use it as a dedicated audio player running Ubuntu or Jelly Bean. .... But in the end, I'm not all that attached to LMS. If I can hook a touchscreen to the Wandboard and use an Android or Linux equivalent of Foobar 2000, I'll be happy.

and then Shardstrat wrote:
Naw, I never said I wanted a player that doesn't need a server.

I guess I misinterpreted your earlier comments, or you and I define "server" differently.

Shardstrat wrote:
The Wandboard, running Community Squeeze OS F19 (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthrea ... -Release-1), and the NAS would be the server.

That will be slow.

Shardstrat wrote:
As for replacing the Touch, I'd do that as an option once the Wandboard is in place, because its audio output will match or exceed the Touch's, and because the Wandboard can drive a 7" display.

You can get a big portable touchscreen display for the Touch today: Just buy an Android tablet and run Logitech's "Squeezebox Controller" app on it. I'm running that app on a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and it works great.

Shardstrat wrote:
In terms of purchase price alone, your 100$ PC is a good idea, asis recycling old equipment. But power consumption, noise, heat, and space are also considerations.

If those factors are more important than cost, run LMS on a new x86-based single-board computer instead of a used desktop PC. Or replace your NV+ with a NAS, like the Pro or the 516, that contains an x86-based single-board computer.

Shardstrat wrote:
I don't doubt that an x86 PC would be more powerful than the Wandboard. But remember that the Wandboard is being asked only to send audio files to the Touch

If it's running LMS, that is not true. Your NAS only sends audio files to the Wandboard, but then the Wandboard runs the music scanner and database, runs a web server, runs the user interface of every player, transcodes and does other audio processing, etc. Here's an old overview of the LMS functionality circa version 6.5.1: http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Slim_Server_Specification_%286.5.1%29. Modern versions of the server do even more.

Shardstrat wrote:
Also consider that the Wandboard the Squeezebox community's solution is based on is a Freescale i.MX6D i.MX35 533. I'd be interested to hear what you think abut the difference.

The Squeezebox Touch is based on the i.MX35 running at 533 MHz.

The Wandboard is based on an i.MX6Dual running at 1GHz, so it's more than twice as fast as the Touch.

The Wandboard CPUs run at only 2/3 the speed of the NV+ CPU, but the Wandboard has more RAM and a newer ARM architecture than the NV+ (and the dual CPUs probably help in some situations, too), so your proposed Wandboard-plus-NV+ combination might run LMS at around the same speed or slightly faster than the NV+ alone. You reported a 15-second delay with the NV+ and your 30K-track library; someone else in this thread reported a 10-second delay with the Wandboard on a 25K-track library. That's about what I'd expect.

The ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus (1.8GHz Intel Atom D525) will run LMS faster than the NV+, and a ReadyNAS Pro 6 will be faster yet -- and MUCH faster with a $35 CPU upgrade and/or a RAM upgrade. I would expect the ReadyNAS 516 to be faster than an upgraded Pro 6.

Five-year-old midrange PCs will be about as fast as the upgraded Pro6, and a modern low-end PC will be about as fast as the 516.

You presumably already have a PC that you use for other purposes. Have you tried running LMS on it? That's an easy experiment and it would show you the potential improvement that you could get with fast hardware.