You're right to point out that Slim Server has a synchronization feature. Search is not working in the forums right now, so I can't point to the thread I participated in where the extreme shortcomings of the feature were reviewed. Summary: Synchronization works by putting every device in "Pause" before the beginning of each song, and then sending "Unpause" to every device. At computer speeds, you'd think this would be enough, but it really works very badly in practice. It presumes that all devices are similar enough in response to commands, buffering, and latency, and that turns out to be totally untrue.
With a mix of Roku Soundbridge which emulates Squeezebox 1, Softsqueeze and Squeezebox devices, the differences end up being up to FIVE SECONDS between the devices. With internet radio, there is often no detectable song boundary to pause upon, so that implementation simply does not work at all. To do a proper synch, one needs synchronized time between all devices to the milisecond level, the ability to establish, and sometimes correct the latency between when a sound sample is received and when it actually makes it to the ears of the listener, and finally the way to unobtrusively stall a stream, or catch up in silences to bring out of synch streams into synch. This all must be done continuously, is a difficult problem, and is not anywhere near being implemented. With regards to the failures I've been experiencing, I do intend to query the forum and advertise the symptoms as soon as search comes back up. I've looked in a couple likely threads, but it looks like a couple months have gone by without people really understanding the issue. I'll mention in passing another observation relating to the fragileness of Slimserver: Sometimes problems are not accounted for explicitly. They mysteriously come and go after new releases. In a sense it's unreasonable for me to expect every problem can be traced to its root cause. The server has grown to sufficient size and complexity to prevent this. Yet, I hold out hope that the internal structure of the server would evolve so that core functionality was dedicated to small, well understood routines, and well understood interfaces and that basic problem manifestations like: -- wcattey ------------------------------------------------------------------------ wcattey's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7506 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33695 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
