Slimserver up & running
Wooohooo… I finally resolved the few problems I had with SlimServer today. Okay, maybe not just a few problems, but, hey, it works!
I now have NFS Manager installed on my iMac, providing a solid NFS mount point for my iTunes music library which lives on a remote Linux server. Now, I can rip CDs as Apple Lossless and they’re stored on the Linux server. That was the first challenge. The next challenge was to get SlimServer to actually play Apple Lossless. This involved installing the full mplayer package, then re-write slimserver-convert.conf so that the files are passed from SlimServer to mplayer, where they’re converted to either FLAC or WAV files, then sent on to SoftSqueese. It might not be the most elegant solution, but it really works. I can control the playback from either SoftSqueeze on either of my computers, or through the SlimServer we interface.
I’ve held off on purchasing a SqueezeBox because I wanted to make sure this stuff actually worked as-advertised first. The installation and setup wasn’t trivial, at least for this setup, but this is enough for a basic proof-of-concept. Now I can look into buying a larger hard disk and a SqueezeBox player.
Next up, converting my CDs over to lossless files and storing them on the new server.