Squeezelite I need something else to do in the evenings

[r5yk5]

There is no longer any need for me to mess about with different media servers.

LMS (lyrion not light) + iBroadcast

With the new iBroadcast integration plugin I can finally do everything I want to do with one system.

In my journey here I have tried and used many options, some of them will do some of the things I want, none of them will do all

Emby (which I still have on my other box as it does dvds and photos etc so it's nice as a back up for the music)
Plex
Roon
Audrivana
jRiver
minidlna
minimserver
Asset Upnp (which still has my audio drama collection)
Navidrome
LMS (the other one)

There are others that this combination solves but the 4 big capabilities for me are:

1. Showing me albums, filtered or not, randomly so I can choose one. Which lms will do but iB won't.

2. On the fly tagging without actually changing the files. iB will do but lms won't.

3. Having the same library both inside and outside my house. iB is very reliable when out and about, much more so than Emby, Roon Arc, Symphonium etc in my experience. Plexamp is good in that area but, for me that's it's only plus point. I really don't like plex as a music server and I'm certainly not having Emby AND Plex for my pitiful dvd collection. LMS doesn't do this without an immense amount of faffing and then it's still not reliable.

4 Playing music without needing my phone, I leave it upstairs, in the car or where ever. It does my head in, needing my phone to play music. I wish the wiim ultras would have a squeezebox style navigable menu but I guess those days are gone.
But now there's no more adding script generated updated playlists to my Wiim presets every other day. Dynamic playlists based on on the fly tags play me different music every time I press it.
I can add a custom tag to a load of albums in iB, say a combination of 80s hair metal and Verve label Jazz, add a couple of Vivaldi Concertos and assign that tag to play a random album, via lms, from that set, to a button on my Wiim remote.

This is the magic combination. LMS's wiim integration, virtual libraries and dynamic playlists in combination with iB's on the fly tagging and reliable mobile streaming.

That, friends, is what I always wanted.

 

[Aquaman]

What good is modifying tags that don‘t touch the files?

I‘m admittedly not familiar with iB but very well with Lyrion.

 

[Burnside]

What good is modifying tags that don‘t touch the files?

I‘m admittedly not familiar with iB but very well with Lyrion.

I first came across iBroadcast in the Alexa arena at least seven or eight years ago when it first emerged - it allowed you to upload your own tracks to its cloud storage, then you could ask Alexa to play those tracks on demand albeit only at 128kbps. It was one of only a handful of means at the time of playing your own tracks on Alexa. I played around with it for a little while but found the Alexa syntax of “Alexa, ask iBroadcast to play…” rather clumsy and error prone compared to Alexa’s extensive inbuilt music commands. As the tracks were in the iBroadcast cloud, you could access and play them thru its own app as well.

I would have expected the service to move on and be enhanced (which I think it has given it now has a paid membership) but given I already have over 14k tracks uploaded to Amazon Music when they offered that service, plus have my local NAS with Minimserver, LMS etc, I quickly found I didn’t need a service like iBroadcast.

 

[r5yk5]

What good is modifying tags that don‘t touch the files?

To build my own categories of songs albums

Because if I decide I want to categorize 324 unrelated albums as something and then change my mind tomorrow I can. Rather than change the metadata, then rsync here and rclone there and reupload the other again and again.

 

[r5yk5]

I quickly found I didn’t need a service like iBroadcast.

I always wanted to like iBroadcast. If nothing else it's a great backup service. £40 p/a for 2.5 tb is worth it wether I play the music or not.

But, like all music servers, I couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Same with LMS.

But both together, well, for me, that's the answer.

 

[castalla]

I am surprised that apart from Sonos (& now lms) no other systems offer iB as a feature.

 

[Burnside]

I am surprised that apart from Sonos (& now lms) no other systems offer iB as a feature.

Maybe the others don’t have as deep pockets as Sonos to entice them…

 

[castalla]

Maybe the others don’t have as deep pockets as Sonos to entice them…

But the iB api has been available free for years. As for Sonos, I don't think there's a fee to produce a 'service'.