Re: Developing replacement for AT

Peter G. Viscarola wrote:

> I'm particularly fond of the AT's feature of not requiring
> server-side software to communicate with the AT.  Is this in your
> plan?

Of course - unlike the AT it may need to be told which shares to search
rather than just finding them itself however. While the idea behind this
on the AT is great, in practice it tends to find all sorts of junk and
takes ages to search.

The closest it'll get to "server-side software" is the ability to
generate a TOC file, speeding up loading times. I use this myself, all
the MP3 metadata from the ID3 tags is stored in a MySQL database, and a
small script generates the atron.vtc file, alltracks.m3u files, and
provides a back-end for the Pinnacle ShowCenter and MediaMVP units
scattered around the house in addition to the two ATs.

The way my ATs are set up is that they search \\media\mp3 at startup,
with a TOC file present. This means they load 7,000 tracks in a few seconds.

> I assume a hard-wired ethernet interface is on your feature list as
> well?

Yes, unlike the AT it'll be 10/100Mbit, as FLAC requires a higher
bandwidth anyway and more and more switches seem to be 100Mbit only.
Nowadays the difference in price between 10 and 10/100 is pennies,
indeed 10Mbit Ethernet chips are quite rare.

--
  Glenn Richards                                     Tel: (01453) 845735
  Squirrel Solutions                 http://www.squirrelsolutions.co.uk/

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