Snakeoil Gear Isolation Beta Series

[agent_kith]

Thank you Agent Kith for big leap forward with 1.2 Alpha3.  I am happy enough to continue running 20.04/1.2 Alpha3.

Have done most of my listening with Mpd, but have tested LMS with Tidal, upmpdcli as client and MinimServer.  LMS low volume resolved in web player (should have looked for it!). There are some things to be resolved. 

Unsure if I can fix that default volume in LMS, but it's certainly something I'll try and look into next.

16.04/1.1.11 to 1.2 Alpha3

• TOP shows load nearly double of 1.1.11, any reason why?  My NUC has plenty in reserve, but for other people with low powered units, this may be a problem.

Give it a few minutes (or hours).. It might be trying to collate the music database (which is rather I/O intensive).. All should be good once that completes.

Text on monitor attached to NUC still saying 1.1.11 (Blind testing).  Showing 1.2.0.3 on Dashboard.

Whoops. I forgot about that.. Will see if I can fix that in the beta.

Error message in script, not finding temp folder to delete. Did not recall seeing text to reboot, but required reboot to work

I should be able to fix that in the next release

Install 20.04 & 1.2 Alpha3

• Not an issue in itself, but installing 20.04 takes some time, especially with the security updates, compared with very trim SnakeOil 16.04

This is actually an issue. Because it will be running some additional systems services which I don't really want. This will be fixed in the WebApp in the future (probably 1.2.1) as a system tweak (aka in Snakeoil menu)

No issues with script, no errors, message to reboot

Hurray!

Have to use ip address to access system, not hostname

Forgot to install avahi (Bonjour). Will fix this.

Text on monitor attached to NUC not saying anything about SnakeOil

This is related to the same problem in 16.02 showing the old version of Snakeoil. Fixing that underlying problem should fix both issues.

Have separate USB card.  Needed to manually remove hw:0,0 and add hw:1,0 to get ALSA to work

That is likely going to be the new behaviour for now. It seems even when disabling onboard audio, secondary audio cards always start as device 1.... But for some reason after a few weeks it will revert back to 0... I'm not exactly sure what happens here, but might re-tweak the whole audio setup in the future in the hope I can get rid of this.

LMS goes through setup procedure including login to mysqueezebox, lots of plugins enabled

That can't be avoided I think. But I will try and see what I can do. Perhaps copy a 'pre-set' database after LMS is installed.

Mympd not working

Can you SSH into the machine, and sudo to root. As root, run '/usr/local/bin/mympd' and tell me what it says?

For some reasons I have problems getting this to work across 14.04, 16.04 and 20.04.

TOP shows significant drop, between 30% to 80% less than 16.04/1.1.11; maybe due to optimised compile and Mympd not running?

The newer kernel 5.x is a lot better. But then it also may be due to the database scan (or playback). In general CPU load is fine as long as you don't get dropped audio.

CPUSet not installed on restore

Whoops! Forgot about that!! I suck.. I will fix this in the next installer.

Sound Quality (SQ)
One of my concerns with moving on from 16.04/1.1.11 was SQ.  It had a RT kernel, many years of optimising and setting process priority was not needed.  With 20.04, a generic kernel was being used.  My concerns were unfounded; still not using process priority.  My initial impression was, maybe a slight SQ improvement, but as everyone knows, music memory is not reliable.  I did find MPD 0.22.3 better than 0.21.25, maybe due to the compile optimisation.  Need to listen longer to draw a more definitive answer on SQ, but can say SQ is at least as good.

20.04 should be a positive step forward. 18.04 is a step (or ten) back, hence I was never really motivated to get Snakeoil to work on 18.04.. And because of that, the whole project is stuck. This move to an installer, while extremely painful, should be better for the future of the Snakeoil platform.

In Windows I think there is a program (which you have to pay heaps of money for) to run and it will optimise the PC for audiophiles. The snakeoil installer will also be doing something similar in the future (and also in the WebApp, a button that says optimise!)