LMS on latest ReadyNAS products?

When they have the DAC module ready for the wandboard maybe as a controller.
The quad wandboard might do well as an LMS server.
The only issue might be the storage. I am not a fan of hanging terabytes of disk and external power off of little servers.
I prefer having a bit of fault tolerance.

No, in fact what I mean is use the Wandboard - or a CuBox or some other tiny computer - solely to host LMS and read files from the NAS, and use the Touch's audio output via my existing DAC.

Shardstrat wrote:
Thanks. What I'm thinking of doing is keeping the Squeezebox Touch but installing LMS on the Wandboard instead of the NAS. I'm hoping that will improve the very slow performance of LMS on the NV+. Do you think it's worth a try?

No.

If you have an NV+ v1 (Sparc-based), the Wandboard will be faster... But I can't imagine LMS running even as slowly as you describe on a v1, so you probably have a v2. And I don't think even the top-of-the-line Wandboard Quad will be faster than the NV+ v2. The Wandboard Quad has 2GB of RAM and a more advanced ARM processor than the NV+ v2, but it also clocks that processor more slowly: 1GHz vs 1.6GHz. And the SATA interface on the Wandboard is undoubtedly slower than the RAID interface on the NV+.

But even if the Wandboard were twice as fast as the NV+, LMS with your large music library would still be annoyingly slow on it. For decent performance, you'll need an x86-based server. In my experience, LMS runs very well on a Pro 6 with an upgraded Core2 Duo Pentium CPU and 8GB of RAM, and it runs ok on an Ultra 2 Plus with the stock Atom D525 CPU and 2GB of RAM. It will undoubtedly run well on any of the new x86-based ReadyNAS devices (like the 516), too.

And if you don't want to replace your NAS, almost any PC built in the last decade will run LMS perfectly well, too. For less than the cost of the Wandboard, you can get on Craigslist and buy an old desktop that'll run circles around it.

Thanks for the reply. I'm beginning to think that the problem lies with LMS itself rather than with the processing power of the NAS or of a low-power board. 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. Surely it'll be able to pop up a menu and let me select a song in less than 15 seconds?

Shardstrat wrote:
use the Wandboard [ ] solely to host LMS and read files from the NAS, and use the Touch's audio output via my existing DAC.

fastfwd wrote:

Shardstrat wrote: Thanks. What I'm thinking of doing is keeping the Squeezebox Touch but installing LMS on the Wandboard instead of the NAS. I'm hoping that will improve the very slow performance of LMS on the NV+. Do you think it's worth a try? And if you don't want to replace your NAS, almost any PC built in the last decade will run LMS perfectly well, too. For less than the cost of the Wandboard, you can get on Craigslist and buy an old desktop that'll run circles around it.

As noted above, the wandboard dual approach will cost about $150. I switched my LMS server from ReadyNAS to a wandboard mounting ReadyNAS about 10 months ago. Yes, a PC will probably run LMS faster, but it's hard to beat a 5W diskless computer that doesn't need maintenance. LMS native on the ReadyNAS Pro was very fast. My wandboard dual handles a 25K track library with multiple SB classic and SB touch players with 10 second response upon entering the top-level directories (~300 directories). I expect better performance from the wandboard quad. Also note other users experience performance differences across different versions of LMS.

Shardstrat wrote:
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. Surely it'll be able to pop up a menu and let me select a song in less than 15 seconds?

You'd be selling a Squeezebox Touch, which is a music player running Linux on an ARM, in order to finance the purchase of the components you'll need to construct... a music player running Linux on an ARM.

I don't see the point. What am I missing?

The Touch isn't running LMS, the NV+ is. As I understand it only a stripped-down version of LMS will run on the Touch, and it's intended only for use with a USB drive, not for reading files off a NAS. In my setup LMS (for gregb: currently version 7.7.1~33740) "runs" (labors) on the NV+.
The point is just to get LMS off the NV+ and onto something else on which it will run with reasonable responsiveness, and use the NV+ only as file storage. The point of using a Wandboard/Beagleboard/CuBox/ is to avoid having a large PC or a laptop solely for the purpose of playing audio and use a small, dedicated PC - that's fanless and will fit in the cabinet with the amp, DAC, and CD/LP players. The Wandboard just happens to be the board that has been chosen by a group of developers in the Squeezebox Community for building a Squeezebox replacement (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthrea ... interested).
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. Just so I don't have to fall asleep standing in front of the Squeezebox Touch...

So far you've asked about running LMS on a Wandboard, building a Squeezebox Touch replacement out of a Wandboard, and creating a Wandboard-based standalone music player that doesn't need a server.

None of those ideas are as good as buying a PC for $100, running Linux/LMS on it, and playing music through the Squeezebox Touch that you already have. The PC is bigger and louder than a Wandboard, but it will be placed next to your NAS, wherever that is. The Squeezebox Touch will fit in your cabinet.

And by the way... LMS 7.7.1 is really old. You might find that a newer version of LMS, like 7.8.x, is faster even on the NV+.

Naw, I never said I wanted a player that doesn't need a server. The Wandboard, running Community Squeeze OS F19 (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthrea ... -Release-1), and the NAS would be the server. 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. At that point I'd sell the Touch and end up - maybe - with a better solution and money left over for purchasing hi-res audio.

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. 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 (or, if it ends up being a replacement for the Touch, playing the files). 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. Specs can be had at: http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/ ... e=taxonomy

Thanks for your interest.

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.