I would like to open up this topic to get feedback regarding an installation of Squeezeslave on a dedicated or conveniently located Media Director rather than an instance of Squeezeslave located in the Core. The reason I'm asking these questions is because I'm getting rather selfish with my 810 Alpha2-Latest (alpha2.29) running quite reliably and hate to start experimenting on the Core of which, at times, can break a otherwise daily, functioning, system that the family is using.
Setting a spare computer up as a diskless Media Director to test and run Squeezeslave is much more easy and appealing considering the above statement.
- If Squeezeslave can be sucessfull on a MD vs. on the Core, does this relieve the Core of unnecessary duties and processing responsibilities since the MD is now servicing Squeezeslave processes?
- Does the Media Director still need two sound cards, an additional one for each instance of Squeezeslave?
- Understanding that the MD is doing the Squeezeslave processing, is there still a lot of harddrive activity on the Core due to the fact that the MD is Diskless, and then, does this become senseless, meaning that it might as well remain installed on the Core?
- Also, there is only a Wiki page for Squeezeslave on the Core and not one for Squeezeslave on a Media Director, is that to say this is how it should be done or should there be another wiki for On-The-MD?
I know this may be redundant for some that have been there before, but I am just trying to centralize this information for those that are considering Squeezeslave for the first time, and want a clear understanding of what the options are before starting.
To answer your questions.
There is no reason why squeezeslave shouldn´t work on an MD. Add a USB 2-ch soundcard to your diskless MD.
Having squeezeslave running on a MD will probably save several users from running long cables from their core to a near speaker amplifier.
Please try and see if it work for you and then update our wiki page with your results.
Before you install you need a dedicated soundcard for squeezeslave in order to operate it in it´t own EA independent of your what is running on your MD.
As to your question re hdd activity there want be much difference. Intially your MD wil load squeezeslave into memory and then your core will stream audio to it causing hdd activity.
The only difference md vs. on core is the initial hdd activity caused when squeezeslave is started initially and it aint much data that squeezeslave need to load for it to run.