The reason you need the server is because thats the way the entire squeezebox system was designed. It was designed from the ground up as a SYSTEM of server and players, the players get their audio data from the server over a network. All the squeezebox "players" have used this system. The Touch is the first hardware in the squeezebox line that had any capability of having media attached to it (which as far as I can tell was an after thought, the processor had a USB port on it so the hardware guys put the plug on the back). The result is that all the software on the Touch is written for the squeezebox system, audio data comes to the player over a network from a server.
After they got the hardware working some of the programmers started thinking "hey I wonder if we could get a server to run on the Touch", well it didn't. They had to start turning off all kinds of functionality but they finally got it to run on the Touch hardware. This is the "tiny" server. The reason you can't just "play a file" is that it was never designed to do so. It would take throwing away the existing software and rewriting it as a dumb player. Actually it would probably be easier to write a "dumb server" that used the existing protocol to talk to the exisiting player software. But nobody has written that yet. The problem with such a server is that invariably "feature creep" will set in. Somebody will want just one extra piece of info on the screen. Just one more way to find music in a big library. Just a slightly more sophisticated way to build a playlist etc. Pretty soon the sleek, simple fast server is now a big bloated thing all over again. So unless you or someone else wants to write the "just play the file" server or player, you are kind of stuck with using the existing TinyLMS. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82070 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
