SliMP3 is no longer spelled SliMP3. With our new identity, it will be SLIMP3.
Mac OS X:
The server is now installed as Preference Pane, thanks to Dave Nanian, instead of an Application and now has support for automatically starting up at boot or login time.
Fixed a bug that didn't display the correct title for URLs and iTunes playlists
on the top line when browsing saved playlists and the music library.
New installations will default to having the CLI turned on. Useful for things like the OSX Remote.
A German customer found that some of the content in the iTunes Music Library.xml file is localized. We were using the 'Kind' field to determine what kind of data it was. Not good. So now we look at the Mac file type long and the URL and hazard a guess.
Added a new SLIMP3 Remote application for controlling the playback of the SLIMP3 from a Mac OS X desktop. Thanks to Dave Camp for this contribution.
Player Interface:
Added a screen dimming feature. If the player is on, but not playing and not animating, dim the screen until the next IR input. Even though we've never seen any burn-in, this should make some folks more comfortable.
Optimize playing the Nth song in a playlist from the remote. It was really slow.
Fixed a a bug where the server could crash when two players are synced and a new song starts.
Add All Albums and All Songs browsing so you can see a list of all the albums associated with a given Genre or all of the songs listed for a given artist. Particularly useful for compilation albums.
Default to having a second level Search menu. You can also disable this from the prefs and put the individual search menus back on the top level.
When displaying the file length, put in commas/periods to make large numbers readable.
Corrected separators in short date formats.
When the user browses with the remote and chooses a song in the context of an album, we start playing the whole album starting at that song. To be consistent, we now also play all of the songs in a given directory if you browse in that directory, choose a song and press PLAY. (Note: we don't recurse in this situation, we only look at songs at the current level. If you want to recurse, choose the directory and press PLAY.)
Added support for pressing PLAY or REC when in the search screens. It will now automatically play or add the search results to the playlist.
Richard Purdie's cool fix for the streaming CPU hogging bug.
Added basic support for fast forward and rewind by pressing and holding the FWD and REW keys.
Included the submitted patch from Gregory Smith that ignores leading articles (The Le Les La Las Los...) for sorting only. You can change which articles to ignore in the advanced settings area.
Added a volume area to settings. Now you can almost completely control the IR interface with six buttons: UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, PLAY, REC
Added support for multiple IR code sets, including the codeset for our new remote.
Added BASS and TREBLE controls to the Settings menu, based on a patch from Richard Purdie.
When browsing an album or a directory via the remote
and you press play on a song, it plays the whole album, starting at that point.
Reworked the IR settings file. There's one file per remote IR code set, so
we can handle multiple remotes by adding new .ir files. These files contain
IR code to button mappings. New remotes that respond to new codes should
have corresponding .ir files created for them.
There's a new file, Default.map, in the IR directory that contains the button to function mappings. Intrepid users who want to remap the buttons on their remote can modify this file to their liking.
Web Interface
Add All Albums and All Songs browsing so you can see a list of all the albums associated with a given Genre or all of the songs listed for a given artist. Particularly useful for compilation albums.
Added a facility to serve the raw music files via HTTP: Like this: http://myserver:9000/music/virtual/path/to/song.mp3 Only works with songs.
Fixed many cases where you'd get the funny nested frame problem due to bugs in Opera and Safari.
Added an HTML template directive: [INCLUDE html/path/here.html] will include the parsed contents of the file in html/path/here.html in the output. Subroutines!
Hide directory entries that start with __ including our __current.m3u file
Fixed a couple of it's that should have been its.
When displaying the file length, put in commas/periods to make large numbers readable.
Added support for mDNS/Zeroconf/Rendezvous advertising of the SLIMP3 services. Initially supports OS X and one flavor of Linux.
Changing playlist request through stream.mp3 to match regular syntax. Now use: http://slimserver:9000/stream.mp3?p0=playlist&=load&=playlistpath.m3u& The final & is so that WinAmp doesn't choke on it and is ignored by us. Playlistpath can be an URL escaped full path, an iTunes playlist URL (URL escaped), or a naked playlist name from the Saved Playlist directory.
Added x-p0 through x-p4 to the HTTP headers in responses to that you can
query and get information using the executecommand() syntax, also used by the
CLI.
Added a "Previous" button on the status page.
Sorting of artists albums and song titles ignores articles like "The" and "La". You can change which articles to ignore in the advanced settings area.
Added ability to move items in the playlist around in the Moser skin.
Added new advanced settings page for setting debug variables
When looking at song information from the web interface, return a valid
URL for songs, even if they are file URLs.
Return the values of p0 through p4 as headers in HTTP responses. Useful
for using HTTP for interactive control. Also return the selected player
name and id
When you start to play music from the web interface, power up if it's
powered off.
You can download music files from the server using a path like: http://server/Music/path/to/song.mp3
Added support for multiple skins simultaneously. http://server:9000/Moser/ will show the Moser skin automatically.
Documentation and Online Help
Updated FAQ and documentation
Updated the HTTP documentation for new and previously undocumented commands.
The technical documentation had references to a command called appendalbum, but it's really called addalbum.
First pass at merging the FAQ on the website with the FAQ in the documentation. This will also appear on the web site. Needs a new index and more organization.
Added a FAQ entry identifying the ports that are used so that folks can configure their firewalls more easily.
Updated the FAQ with a bunch of, you guessed it, frequently asked questions.
File Formats
No longer recursing into playlists during scans. We may need a power-user option for this, but the new behavior will help more people than it hurts.
Improved Ogg Vorbis transcoding support. You need to have the Ogg tools and LAME installed for this to work. Only tested on Unix.
Adding support for the ID3 tags that describe the album number and number of albums in a multi-disc set, in the same manner that we do for iTunes importing.
The IR code format was messed up in the previous release, it's fixed, but if you've created custom IR files, you'll have to update them.
Internationalization and Localization
Swedish and Danish localizations from Andreas Olsson and Morten Fischer-Madsen
Andreas found some strings that weren't localizable.
Improved Dutch Localization courtesy Carel Blast
Linux/Solaris/Unix:
Fixed an occasional warning from the Animation module.
Added FreeBSD notes to the Installation.txt docs.
Patch from datavortex: changed account to a system account and shell to nologin. - don't add user with default name if the admin changed it.
When running the server in daemon mode, rename the process "slimp3d"
Command-line interface:
Added and documented the "exit" command to the CLI. Closes the connection.
Added new command line argument, --stdio, which enables CLI interface
on standard in/out. Now you can safely put the server into the background
from a shell.
Player Firmware
Added command line options to update_firmware to specify IP and MAC in interactive mode.
Calling the latest firmware 2.0b2.
SliMP3's MAC is now in bytes 12..17 of our UDP header
Added support for multiple IR code sets, including the codeset for our new remote.
Pressing and holding the POWER button for a long time (15 seconds) will reboot the player now, so you don't have to unplug the unit to reconfigure.
Improved the user interface for network settings on the player. You can use the number buttons to enter digits in IP values, use UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT consistently throught the interface, use FWD and REW to skip forward and back a screen at a time.
Fixed a problem where URLs in iTunes playlists were being ignored.
Fixed a problem where we were showing internal "iTunesPlaylist:"
URLs where we shouldn't.
Player Interface:
The sleep button wasn't working properly in double-height mode. The
text was on the top line, so you wouldn't see it.
When displaying a file name, correctly separate file and extension.
Web Interface
Added a FAQ to the online documentation.
Improved the Moser skin. Now the arrow links look like buttons. Note
that the button appearance looks a ton better in Mozilla 1.1 and IE 5.5 than
it does in IE 5.01.
Added an additional server setting to allow sorting and browsing by
file name instead of ID3 tag information. (This was added in b7, but the
release notes weren't updated.)
Fixed some problems in HTML with the documentation.
Fixed some problems in HTML with the "page bar" listings.
Fixed a capitalization issue with "Player Settings"
Minor editing to some of the other help documents.
Redid the Getting Started help document based on the new getting started
flyer.
Added a {webroot} parameter to the templates for easier absolute references.
This is set to "/SLIMP3" if a request comes in with /SLIMP3
as the start of the path. This eliminates the need to use updirs ".."
in the on-line documentation. It also corrects some invalid (to people
using the /SLIMP3 prefix) absolute references which were pre-existing.
Fixed all color references in CSS files.
File Formats
Fixed a problem where only "http://" URLs were working in
PLS files.
Fixed a problem where songs referenced in a playlist often didn't have
all their metadata loaded. We now check and load it if it isn't there.
If there's a title in the playlist, that overrides any other found.
Internet Radio/Streaming
Fixed a problem where redirected URLs for streams were losing their
title.
Fixed a problem where URLs redirected through PLS files were losing
their title.
Fixed a problem where if a shoutcast station sent an empty title, we'd
throw away a perfectly good title.
Linux/Solaris/Unix:
Updated the Unix installation.txt file.
Command-line interface:
Added --nosetup startup parameter. This disables setup from the web
pages, as well as anything that uses Playlist::executecommand with a p0
of pref. When --nosetup is used on the command line, the settings pages
are not linked from home, and if they are explicitly requested a 403 Forbidden
is returned.
Player Firmware
Firmware 1.3 final version. This version is the same as 1.3b4, just
updated the version number.
Improved the handling and display of multi-disc disc numbers.
Player interface:
The shuffling algorithm has been improved to be more random.
MP2 files weren't being recognized correctly.
Web Interface
Arrows added to the Moser skin.
Added an additional server setting to allow sorting and browsing by
file name instead of ID3 tag information. (This was added in b7, but the
release notes weren't updated.)
File formats
Some valid "file:" URLs were being ignored, but no longer.
Fixed a bug where M3U files with title information in them weren't appearing
properly.
Internet Radio/Streaming
Fixed a problem where HTTP streaming from the SLIMP3 server would often
disconnect unexpectedly or have other errors.
Fixed a problem with international characters in ID3 tags.
We weren't handling file URLs with C: in them properly...
Mac OS X:
New users are given more reasonable defaults for their playlist and
library folders.
Fixed a problem with firmware updates on OS X 10.1.5.
Fixed a problem where no playlists would show up if an iTunes user didn't
have a playlist directory defined.
If a song in an iTunes playlist doesn't have a "location"
just ignore it. This previously would cause a crash.
iTunes users need their imported international characters translated
from Unicode to LATIN1.
Added support for multi-disc sets in iTunes.
Player interface:
Substantially improved directory loading times when browsing the music
library by inlining some routines, removing some unnecessary checks, and
special-case shortcutting sorting of non-music items (directories, playlists,
shortcuts, etc...)
Stop playing if we haven't heard back from a player in 30 seconds or
more.
Reset the screensaver timer when we come out of Block'ed mode.
Web Interface
If a user doesn't have a playlist directory specified, don't let them
try to save.
When browsing the music library, don't try to show a sorted navigation
bar in large directories, as the sorting can be quite confused.
Added a user warning when renaming a playlist fails.
Fixed a bug where deleting tracks from shuffled playlists wasn't cool.
Improved sorting when browsing music library.
Added an additional server setting to allow sorting and browsing by file name instead of ID3 tag information.
File formats
Trim white space from the beginnings and ends of entries in playlist
files as appropriate.
Fixed several problems handling CUE files.
Networking
Fixed two problems that caused pausing synchronized players to get out
of sync.
Unsync when we power off.
Internet Radio/Streaming
Fixed a bug in shoutcast streams that caused the title obtained from
the
metadata to be cleared out occasionally. It stays put until updated
explicitly again.
Fixed a bug where the scrolling animation was killed everytime new metadata
came in even if it hasn't changed.
Fixed problem where using the http streaming from the server could hog
the CPU.
Linux/Solaris/Unix:
Mike Arnold found a problem where upgrading the RPM could cause problems
because we deleted the slimp3 user. We don't do this anymore.
Command Line Options & Debugging Tools
Firmware updates run in interactive mode will wait for the user to press
return at the end. Good for GUI invocation of CLI application.
Only die if we are debugging, otherwise fail but don't crash.
HTTP and Command Line Interface Automation
Clarify the documentation and fix bugs with "pause" and "mode
pause" commands in CLI.
Firmware
Updated to 1.3b3 firmware, which uses an appropriate source port for
UDP packets from the player.
Miscellaneous
Even if the players are starved for data, run background tasks at least
once a second.
The SLIMP3 Server executable couldn't kill the server process on Win98
because 98 puts the process name in all upper case. It can now.
Mac OS X:
Enable support for Composer field (as an additional artist) for iTunes
users.
When we are scanning the iTunes library, don't tell the user they can
browse the music library, because they can't.
Fixed a problem with the ID3 library where iTunes has some ID3 tags
that have spaces in the tag name. We now allow a space.
Fixed a problem in iTunes where multi-line comments would cause the
parser to get confused.
New users get a reasonable default for the path to their Music Library
and their Playlist folder. (Namely: /Users/name/Music/ for both).
Player interface:
Fixed a problem where pressing STOP didn't always stop the playback
immediately.
Some work on the garbage display bug. We now correctly force the display
back into 8 bit mode with every display update. If the bug happens in
a particular frame, it will be repaired in the next frame.
When a new song starts, stop any scrolling and animation for all synced
players so that the correct song information is displayed.
Fixed a cosmetic bug that happend with double-sized characters when
the first character was an S.
Improved the display code to reduce the amount of processing, and number
of bytes sent (especially when there's a cursor). There's still a bug
somewhere (maybe in the VFD display itself) where the cursor flashes randomly
on the screen occasionally.
Fixed the Welcome To SLIMP3 screen to work again when the server or
the player restarts.
Fixed a problem where changing the brightness when in double-sized broke.
Fixing the double-height right arrow, K and N characters.
Fixed (I think) a problem where we were sometimes dropping stop and
pause commands.
Clean up the custom character code to handle all possible bitmaps, improve
performance (a bit), and never send bogus data to the player.
Web Interface
If the songs in a specified album have duplicate track numbers, then
sort by artist first. This makes "Greatest Hits" work out better.
If there are not duplicate track numbers, then sort by track number first,
which makes compilation albums sort properly.
If there are two albums with the same title, sort the songs by artist
first.
Removed Games setting in Advanced Server settings, as it isn't needed.
Use the new Home menu editing facility.
Don't show duplicate songs in albums.
Fixed a broken link to the CLI documentation.
Fix a typo that made searching for songs via the web interface crash
the server.
Fixed a missing space in the playlist template for songs.
File formats
Included the patch to support YEAR GENRE and COMMENT in CUE files.
Clean up of caching of track data to make CUE files work a little better.
CUE file entries weren't going into the genre cache. Now they are.
There are a couple of situations where we mean to merge in new meta
information not replace it altogether. So now we do that.
Internet Radio/Streaming
Fixed shoutcast metadata display.
Fixed HTTP streaming (from the SLIMP3 server) to work reliably.
Linux/Solaris/Unix:
Included submitted solaris build information by Mike Arnold.
Included submitted patch for relocatable RPM support by Mike Arnold.
Command Line Options & Debugging Tools
Added better backtrace output.
HTTP and Command Line Interface Automation
Return a content type for status.txt of text/plain
Firmware
Updated firmware to version 1.3b2 to fix possible problems with corrupted
display data
Removed display init on sleep wakeup
Removed LCD_CLEAR when displaying ICMP unreachable
Changed LCD packet parsing to check for ==0x02 or ==0x03, instead of
just checking the two last bits. Removed support for the wait command.
Miscellaneous
The ends of songs were being cut off when we had mulitple players synced.
We should allow for quite a few chunks of silence to be pre-queued when
resyncing at the end of song.
Fixed the display of all LATIN1 characters. We don't have a full character
set in the player, so we map as closely as possible.
Disabling UTF8 support for now. It wasn't making things much better.
Calculate the content type from the path name unless we've already got
one. This fixes some problems with saving playlists.
A variety of performance optimizations to reduce overall CPU usage.
Fixed a problem where Windows .lnk files wouldn't work properly.
The Windows shell application now can quit and leave the server running.
There's a new preference for this as well as a menu choice to set it.
This choice is confirmed if you have confirm turned on.
Use the "Bagpuss" look as the default on Windows.
Mac OS X:
The OS X application now shows the status of the server (on or off)
by changing the icon on the dock and on the SLIMP3 Server main window.
Fixed a problem where if a user was using the iTunes importing feature,they
couldn't browse their saved playlists unless they turned off iTunes support
and then turned it on again.
The OS X application menus were cleaned up. There's now a menu choice
and keyboard equivalent to start and stop the server.
The OS X application automatically starts the server when it launches.
iTunes users now get their iTunes playlists along with the other saved
playlists. These are read-only, due to the one-way importing of the iTunes
library information.
Somehow the firmware updater menu got disabled in the OS X application.
Re-enabled it.
The OS X application displays the server status more reliably.
iTunes gets unhappy (and starts ripping songs as "Uknown"
if you keep its library file open when it tries to write to it. So we
open it and read the whole darned thing in at once and then parse it from
memory. Which is faster anyways.
Warn the user that scanning is still happening for iTunes too.
Player interface:
Bingo! Killed the garbage character bug that was plaguing 1.3b4 firmware.
The problem wasn't in the firmware, rather the server was sending a control
code t that was causing some problems on the client. Removed that code
and as a bonus, cleaned up how we send brightness commands.
Jeff Bain submitted some tweaks to the double-size characters and layout.
Lookin' good!
Fixing bugs in synchronization: Unsyncing the master was broken, unsyncing
sometimes didn't stop the audio right away.
Rework the 1.3 streaming code to stall out less often. We also stop
scanning (and other background tasks) if the client's buffer runs below
half full.
Disable repeated buttons, including Volume when the player is "off".
Fixed a problem where pressing pause in quick succession would cause
things to lock up badly.
Saved Playlists should come right after Music Library from the remote.
Fade out when we sleep...
Disable the syncing of HTTP clients, as it doesn't really work.
Add song information about which ID3 tags we are using.
Improved animation behavior under load. We now skip frames when appropriate
and check the timers before and after handling client streaming.
Turn the timeout used by the streaming protocol for the 1.3 firmware
way down so the queue doesn't stall for so long when we drop a packet.
Web Interface
Fixed a problem added in 3.0b5 that would sometimes show a "please
set up your playlists" screen when trying to save the current playlist.
Updated the sorting used when browsing the music library so it sorts
by artist, album, track number and title, in that order.
We no longer throttle the scan, so we shouldn't tell the user that we
do in the advanced server settings.
Fixed a word in the text displayed when the server doesn't know about
any player.
You can now customize the Home menu int the "Additional Server
Settings" area, courtesy RMoser.
Internet Radio/Streaming
On occasion, streaming radio connections were left open for a long time.
Consolidated the closing of open files and streams to fix this.
Linux/Unix:
RPM: make sure the new slimp3 user doesn't have a home directory
SLIMP3 lives in /usr/local not /usr/local/bin for the RPMs
Try and load a system Time::HiRes before the local version.
We keep around the server scripts when building a release for zipping
and tarring.
Command Line Options & Debugging Tools
Added --streamaddr and --playeraddr command line options to allow the
caller to specify which interface to listen on for remote streaming and
player UDP.
Fixed a bug where we weren't keeping track of the last time we went
through the idle loop properly.
Added a bunch of additional debugging output to make monitoring of timing
and performance easier.
Include the d_stream debug flag for debugging the new streaming protocol.
--d_sync Added a synch debugging flag.
Added the ability to turn on/off debugging flags from the command line
interface. This isn't useful from the remote interface but is very useful
from stdio.
Expose --d_stream_v for verbose stream debugging info. --d_usage shows
a 0-9 digit in the rightmost part of the display on 1.3 and a 2 byte hex
code on the left on 1.2. We also spit out a percentage to stderr on 1.3
HTTP and Command Line Interface Automation
Updated the CLI documentation to explain the "rescan" (old)
and "path" (new) commands. Added the path command to the CLI.
Fixed a bug that was causing us to ignore parameters after the pause
command which we hardly ever used.
If you put up some text on the screen with the HTTP or CLI interface
for longer than a few seconds, the screen would blank and possibly get
corrupted. Not anymore.
Miscellaneous
Firmware files now include version number.
Updated the pronto CCF file.
Fixed harmless warning about empty responses when we were sending empty
reponses.
Basic unicode support is enabled.
Sometimes we were giving some warnings with bad ID3 tags when we tried
to get the utf8 version of strings.
We weren't caching unknown file types, so we would keep trying to figure
it out over and over even though we tried once already. This could slow
us down a lot.
Richard Purdie submitted a patch to use a file called ~/.slimp3-strings.txt
(on unix) or slimp3-strings.txt (on windows, in the same directory as
your prefs file) to override some or all of the standard strings in the
strings.txt file. Uses the same format.
There is a standalone application for upgrading the SLIMP3 player firmware.
Windows users now have a standalone application. They no longer need to install ActiveState Perl.
MacOS X:
10.2 compatability bugs have been fixed in the OS X standalone application.
MacOS X: The SLIMP3 server software will automatically sync with the iTunes 3.0 music library.
Linux:
Added a RedHat RPM.
Bugs:
Fixed a problem where zero length MP3 files would crash the server.
Fixed several bugs related to the use of URLs in playlists.
Fixed several problems where the server would hog processor time.
Command line:
Debugging flags have been changed to be clearer. ./slimp3 --help for more information.
Several important command line items were omitted from the --help information.
Commands can be sent to the server from the command line after the server has started.
Internet Streaming:
Streaming Internet radio station playback is much more robust.
The SLIMP3 server can now stream to HTTP-streaming capable programs. Use: http://server:9000/stream.mp3 as the URL. You can control the stream from the web interface. Note: The latency can be quite high, depending on the size of the buffers on th
e receiving applcation.
Localization:
Added Finnish strings.
Other:
Multiple player synchronization is more robust now.
Infrared codes are configured within the IR directory.
Sparc Linux support added
The server supports a command-line style interface, useful for home automation installations, including Crestron. See the online technical documentation for details.
Player Interface:
Moved the items in the "Browse Music" menu to the top "Home" level.
The Music Library is now called the Music Folder.
There is now "Settings" area available from the player interface.
You can adjust the time or cancel sleep with the Sleep button on the remote.
You can navigate right into the Artist, Album or Genre from within a song.
Web Interface:
There is a rescan button on the server settings page. Pressing this button will rescan your music library folder.
Fixed a problem with relative URLs that confused Opera.
The documentation is now available via the web interface.
Firmware V1.3a4 (new since V1.2):
The server now has robust support for the new player firmware (version 1.3).
Fixed a bug which was causing problems with Linksys DHCP servers
Fixed sporadic resets when the player loses contact with the server
New streaming protocol - provides the server with greater control over buffering
New kiosk mode lets the player start up instantaneously, skipping the splash screen and setup menus
Added timeout on the setup screen. If nothing is pressed for 15 seconds, the player continues with startup.
Player now ignores Slim Protocol packets coming from anyone except its designated server.
Multiple players can now synchronize their audio outputs to within 1 millisecond of each other. This allows you to play the same music in more than one room, without any "reverb" effect. If the server knows about more than one client, there is a Sync
hronization choice in SLIMP3 Home. Press RIGHT to enter that area. Scroll through the other players and press RIGHT to sync up. Press right again to unsync.
Dean has created a new MacOSX tool for starting and stopping the SLIMP3 server. We are now distributing a MacOSX version of the server in .dmg format. Just drag the icon to your hard disk to install. You can also put it in the dock. The server keeps
running after you log out.
