Back to Musicserver4lox

[tkn]

I had a previous thread going, but since I was doing a whole home renovation, I ended up buying a bunch of Sonos Connects for now. But now that things are slowing down, I want to get back to refining my whole home audio approach. Sonos has too many flaws for me to be happy (the wiring is a pain in the ass, and the lack of integrated pager function is ridiculous).

Key criteria for me:

1. Centrally based in a server rack

2. Supports 16 zones

3. Spotify Connect

4. Pager interrupts

So that sounds a lot like Musicserver4lox.

Questions still remain for my perfect server.

1. Can I apply a REW EQ profile to each zone? I would like to audio correct each speaker and each zone.

2. Can I use a studio style USB audio interface for enough channels.

3. Does it support syncing music? It wasn't clear to me if I could turn on a bunch of zones and roam around the house.

4. How do doorbell chimes work? Can I designate a playlist or something as a ringtone? What about other notifications?

[David Wallis]

2) If its got linux kernel support then I would expect so - I'm currently just using a usb soundcard which works ok.

3) yes

4) it plays an MP3 that you designate, you can do custom notifications based on the API call that you make - I've used amazon polly for TTS too.

[David Wallis]

this is what I am using currently

https://www.amazon.co.uk/CSL-8-channel-simultaneous-recording-equipment/dp/B01HM5KP5A

[Duncan]

each of the musicserver4lox internal zones created from sound cards has its own graphic equaliser including 2 custom memory/presets

external zones such as pnp players and logitech physical players eg a squeezebox boom only have whatever equalisation function is built in to the hardware

the range of sound cards is somewhat limited- the multichannel studio card that was linked is expensive and may not work...where as 4 x csl usb cards will cost around £80 and give you 32 internal mono zones or 16 internal stereo zones or any combination in between

there are a number of different types of notifications - a 'ring' doorbell notification (usually a chosen mp3 file) will take precedence over a text to speech notification which are driven by voicerss or polly tts, and all are triggered using virtual outputs from loxone

you can also use the <v> output of a loxone virtual output to pass on variable text to the tts message - i have it announcing the 'now playing' output from a hardware squeezebox player (a musicserver external zone) with the 'now playing' content being fed into a loxone virtual input via the musicserver's own squeeze2loxone server

[tkn]

Is the EQ parametric? Can I take a REW profile and apply the fix to it directly or do I need to translate it into a few bands?

[Duncan]

its a number of bands

[tkn]

So doesn't like full parametric eq.

It is based on squeezebox, right? I wonder if I can use the brutefir plug-in or another eq plug-in?

[Duncan]

in theory yes, but im not sure any have been maintained recently

[tkn]

You had mentioned in another thread you had used a reconditioned laptop and some external USB interfaces?

Would a studio audio interface like a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 work? I can get one quite cheap, and it would have 20 output channels. Instead of building a PC, I was thinking I could run a 2 core VM for musicserver4lox and then use a USB audio interface or two to do sound.

[Duncan]

yes, there are loads of companies selling reconditioned laptops with a years warranty - i bought a few i7 dells with 8gb ram and put in a 512gb ssd as i use it as a music store as well as music server.

i cant speak for the scarlett card, you would have to try it

ive only tested the recommended cs media usb cards and some 8ch HD ones from maplin which work fine but arent available any longer

[David Wallis]

what's quite cheap? A soundcard can be had for less than £20gbp

[tkn]

Has anyone run MS4L under Mac OS rather than Ubuntu?