I was wondering how many LMS users have purchased this device? I'm not going to extol all the features of this software but having tried Plex, Roon, Subsonic, Moode etc, this is where I've landed for my home audio needs. Of course, others have particular use-cases that benefit from running other platforms. I appreciate it can be seen as a bit of a home-brew tinkerers platform but I was pleasantly surprised when Wiim were looking into adding new features to their devices, LMS (squeezelite) was tied at the top with Roon for user requests. Does this popularity cross over to users of higher end devices like the A6? Wiim are implementing squeezelite in the coming weeks to much fanfare, so it seems there was a large, under-served community hoping for streaming devices to meet their needs. Aside from LMS's popularity on Wiim, the slimserver forums have been highly active for years. So if there are alot of LMS users on here (if doing some work here ), could we make a strong, polite request for native squeezelite adoption?!
Hi, I tried the eversolo having come from a rasberry pi running LMS,unfortunately i sent it back. Eversolo is a nice well built product but the software is no good in my opinion LMS is in a different class all together.Rock solid software never had a crash in years i have over 3000 albums the eversolo is way too slow and does not update correctly or read the ID tags correctly. An hour to update after adding a few albums but only takes 10mins with LMS.
LMS is a much underrated product in my view. Rock solid and fast. I’ve been running it for years, first on Vortexbox hooked up to an Oppo Blu-ray player via USB and currently on an Ubuntu virtual server and using piCorePlayer on a Pi with an Allo DigiOne hat out to my Matrix Audio Mini I-3. The iPeng client on my iDevices is nice to use and the whole solution gives me decent access to my music library, BBC Sounds and Spotify connect. I bought the DMP-A6 to to replace this kit lineup but am close to selling the Eversolo due to its annoyances and bugs. Regrettably, the UK dealer I bought it from is being a dick and refusing to accept a return of the DMP despite the obvious flaws on the device and advertised services and features just not working.
Wow, everything you guys are posting to this newbie is like a whole new language. Let's start at the beginning. What is LMS, an app for sorting and playing a music library?
It’s an actual whole music server platform in itself. You need a squeeze compatible player for it too - there are plenty of Raspberry Pi based players around. You can add plugins into LMS for all sort of services like Spotify and BBC Sounds. They then appear as fully fledged apps in the main web interface. It’s been around for years and was abandoned by Logitech but to their credit, they let the open source community loose on it and it still gets love and attention from the community to this day. Edit - meant to say that LMS stands for Logitech Media Server.
@Arcticpollen Have you successfully returned your unit? I'm happily using it as a DLNA renderer with LMS. Would you consider using it this way - the best of both worlds? I've installed the LMS Material app which makes a great display (and controller) in full screen mode.
I've been using LMS for years, and an still completely sold on it. I have many Squezebox players (both physical and virtual), and don't plan to change anytime soon. I setup a Raspberry Pi3 for a friend, running piCorePlayer. This one device acts as LMS server and virtual Squeezebox player, with all of his music on an external SSD drive. His needs are somewhat less extreme than mine, and he was concerned that it was too fiddly for his mindset. He eventually decided to buy a DMP-A6 to replace it. He's just received it last week, so he hasn't been able to setup it up fully with his own music collection. (He bought a 4TB drive and installed it internally.) So far he's just using it as a streamer, and he's generally happy. Getting his own music in and scanned is the next step. I'm curious to see whether the Eversolo is as flexible at interpreting tags, especially multiple genres and artists within a single tag (separated by semi-colons, like "Pop/Rock;Alternative/Indie Rock;Indie Rock;Alternative Singer/Songwriter;Indie Pop;Chamber Pop;Indie Folk;Lo-Fi"). There are separate tags for "Artist", "Album Artist", "Composer", and "Conductor". With LMS you can search those separately, but it can also merge those to search within "All Artists". I also run Madsonic (a Subsonic fork) at my music collection, so that I can play my music remotely, using the Subsonic Android app. Madsonic doesn't handle those multi-valued tags nearly as well, so I feel that pain on a regular basis. I hope that the DMP-A6 isn't similarly challenged.
@Mike Hanson I do exactly the same! LMS and Subsonic - always need redundancy even though both are rock solid. I use Navidrome for the server and Symfonium for playback. Works better than LMS remotely when I've weak network signal. I've not had to rely on the native music player on this device as mainly using LMS thus far. Symfonium would be my choice for local playback though. It's had years of development compared to the native player so unfair to compare really. It takes all its tagging from the server though so I imagine much the same as Madsonic. Maybe your friend could keep that Pi3 around in case the native tagging isn't to his liking. Use LMS (DLNA) for his local collection and happily use the A6 as a streamer as he's been doing.
Nice to see people running Squeezeboxes - I've been using LMS since it was Slim Server in the early 2000s and the only player available was a SLIMP3. I run a Touch, two Booms, two Pis, one Receiver and a Transporter (the original one with the front knob!!) and I have several new old stock devices in storage just in case... Must admit I don't really need to integrate the A6 as I'll only use that for DSD playback, but LMS just can't be beaten for whole house and stability. Also run MusicIP headless via SpiceFly which is invaluable for on the fly smart playlist curation. Can't see me ever replacing it. It's just bomb proof. A lot of companies could learn a lot from it... Oh yeah, and I also have a couple of old valve radios from the 40s and 50s that I've "upgraded" with rPIs and PiCoreplayer...
Thanks, I was unaware of Symfonium. I was using DSub for a while, when I discovered that the sound quality wasn't as good. With the Subsonic app, I could boost the MP3 quality, which made a big difference. Unfortunately it doesn't do gapless playback, which I really miss. I haven't used LMS for remote playback (away from the house), as I don't have a phone app that will talk to LMS and buffer data locally on my phone (once it's played the track). I'll have to play with Symfonium to see how it works with that (and with MP3 quality, as mentioned above). I don't think my friend wants to use the Pi3 at all. He's a smart guy, but doesn't like to fiddle with stuff that's too technical, unless it's an absolute necessity.
I see that it has support for varying rates (defaults to the original / highest quality for both WiFi and Cellular data). It also does gapless playback. The UI is a bit daunting at first, but they all are. Unfortunately it doesn't support Logitech Media Server (only some "LMS" thing that's associated with Subsonic). That means I'll need to continuing running the separate server software. I'll consider switching from Madsonic to Navidrome. I've already got a lifetime Madsonic license, though, so I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. Thanks again.
Actually, how could you achieve that on a lossy format? It's very interesting to me, as I could save 80% of my disk space using MP3s instead of FLACs...
Sorry, I wasn't clear. My music is ripped from CDs (or downloaded as hi-res files) and stored as FLACs. This is fed verbatim from LMS to the Squeezeboxes in my house. I'm running Madsonic as well, pointed to that same trove of FLAC files. It transcodes those FLAC files to MP3, for more efficient streaming to the Subsonic app on my family's phones. That app can choose the quality of the download. I've learned that the Symfonium app also has the ability to make that choice, just like the Subsonic app. It defaults to full-quality, when using either WiFi or Cellular data. I've dialed that back to 320kpbs when running cellular, which is still rather hefty.
I wouldn't bother switching your Subsonic server. They all basically do the same thing from what I can gather. Navidrome is meant to be fast and lightweight. I've not tried Madsonic but reading between the lines of your post, it must offer some built in VPN access to your home server? I've been using Tailscale for this purpose the last few years. Glad your initial impressions of Symfonium are good. I feel like a bit of a shill for this app on this forum! But it works really well on the A6, much better for playing back local media than the native music player. That being said, I'm still using LMS mainly.
I setup a test server this morning, and it doesn't seem to offer anything that Madsonic doesn't also do. I saw a message from a few years back, suggesting that it might soon support multiple values (separated by semi-colons) in the artist and genre tags, but that doesn't seem to be there yet. That would have been enough to make me switch. So I'll be sticking with Madsonic for now. BTW, I do like some things in the Symfonium app, especially its support for gapless playback. However, its UI is much busier than I prefer. (I use it mostly while driving, so I want it to be very focused and minimalist.) It seems to be hyper configurable, though, so I'll try shutting off some of the bells and whistles.
There are specific tags, tag formats and tag versions for this purpose; the problem being taggers and players conforming to the standards... For example, the VORBIS COMMENT, the tag method used by FLAC files, wants a GENRE tag per every genre. The ID3V2.4 (the lates version of it, AFAIK) used in MP3s, OTOH wants the genres separated by "|" (pipe) IIRC. In other words, the functionality is already there; the players and the editors need only to adapt. Ah, another thing... I have seen aberrations like IDV2 tags glued to FLAC files. Yes, unfortunately I have seen it. My conservative developer mind still refuses to accept it.
I'm a software developer as well, and yes, those tagging standards are very "flexibly" applied. I've been using LMS for years, and they long ago supported multiple entries for all tags that I've tried (Artist, Album Artist, Conductor, Composer, Genre). The user specifies which separator to use, and I've been using a semi-colon. With 36,000 tracks on my server, I'm not keen to edit those manually.
for this reason there are the command line tools... ;-) I am only at 13k+ tracks, but if I have ever made any massive correction to them, it has been via such tools like mediainfo, metaflac etc. I also generate an html of my library- using the same tools (and some js)... I'm old school, I know... ;-)
Yeah, I started writing some of my utilities tools with Perl then Python, but got pulled onto something else. It's that old adage of the mechanic's car never getting fixed. I almost got my son interested in continuing my efforts, just as a fun project, but he also lost interest. I'll take a look at mediainfo and metaflac, to see if they can do some of the heavy lifting for me.
