Upgrading to SlimServer 6.2.2 to 6.3.1
SlimServer v6.2.2 has worked well since I upgraded in mid-May but, as with all software, there’s always room for improvement. Most notably, I experienced the same problem mentioned by others using Apple Lossless, namely the first second or so of some tracks is cut off or replaced by white noise. SlimDevices acknowledged this as a bug, and I was hoping it was fixed in the latest stable release of the software so I upgraded to 6.3.1 last week. As with the upgrade from 6.2.1 to 6.2.2, the upgrade was a simple process, documented on Slim’s wiki—backup the SlimServer directory (/usr/local/slimserver on my Fedora Core 4 box), download the file, su, then let rpm install the upgrade with rpm -Uvh slimserver-6.2.2-1.noarch.rpm. Restart SlimServer and you’re up and running. No fuss, no muss.
Unfortunately, no big improvement either. SlimServer still cuts of the first second or so of some songs. Annoying, but not the end of the world. A bigger problem is SlimServer freezing between some tracks. This happened under 6.2.1 and 6.2.2, but it’s happening much more under 6.3.1. My collection has grown considerably, to be sure, but now it seems the music stops every other album. I’ll look up at the SqueezeBox and it’s frozen, which means logging in to the Linux server and restarting the service. This gets old pretty quickly. Sure, this might have something to do with running a BOINC client on the same, slow box but I suspect the real issue is having SlimServer, mplayer and flac all going at the same time and converting from Apple Lossless to FLAC, then streaming the FLAC out to the SqueezeBox.
To get around this, I changed the SlimServer configuratin so that it converts the Apple Lossless files to WAV on the server, and streams the WAV files to the SqueezeBox. Some people on the SlimServer forums have reported good results with this approach, but this didn’t seem to help. The first few seconds of some songs are cut off and it’s still freezing. So 6.3.1 isn’t much of an improvement over 6.2.2, and may even be a step backward on my system.