Sense and LMS

[guardajoias]

Hi. I still use iPeng on my phone as a local player so I can then play music from my Zenith to Airplay devices. Hopefully, one day we can send music directly to Airplay, but for now this is the workaround. Once iPeng is open on the phone, Sense will see it as an endpoint. However, as the database of Sense is now separate from LMS, the information on iPeng is not up to date. It will see and remember albums that I played through Sense on the local player, but it does not sync with the Zenith music. it is not a big issue since I then typically select and play music through Sense anyway and just keep iPeng open as a local player. However, would it be safe to manually tell iPeng to rescan the database (or to do so through the web browser interface of LMS) ? Could it mess with the Sense database or the dates seen for "New Music" in Sense? I am wary of doing anything through the LMS interface...

 

[Stephen Healy]

Hi guardajoias, my understanding is that if you choose to rescan, nothing will happen at all since a lot of this LMS section should actually be disabled; you would to reconfigure large other sections of the system before rescanning an LMS library will actually achieve any results at all. Consequently, i don't think this will have any negative affects on Sense, but probably not worth risking with a test rescan as i can assure you nothing will change at all on the LMS side of things.
I'm sure you have, but did you already try the shairtunes plugin to try streaming to Airplay devices?

 

[guardajoias]

Thanks Stephen. Very helpful. I will then refrain from trying.

I have indeed tried Shairtunes, but what this does is make the Innuos devices able to receive airplay from an iPhone etc. What I try to do is the opposite: see an airplay device such as a HomePod speaker as an available player in Sense to play music from the server to such device... This is a functionality currently not available in Sense. So far, the only way is to have iPeng running on the phone, (and playing music if I want to use the same device) and then go to Sense to select the iPhone as player. Then from the iPhone, I can airplay top the HomePod. Not very practical nor stable...


I think that the Airplay Bridge plugin (https://github.com/philippe44/LMS-Raop) may do what I need, but I do not know if this is supported by Sense and have not risked testing it...

I does say that it "Allows AirPlay players to be used by Logitech Media Server, as a normal Logitech SqueezeBox. It provides synchronisation, replaygain, gapless, fade in/out/cross and all other LMS goodies. AirPlay remotes can be used as well"...

Please let me know if this is something I could test.

Thanks

 

[Stephen Healy]

Thanks Stephen. Very helpful. I will then refrain from trying.

I have indeed tried Shairtunes, but what this does is make the Innuos devices able to receive airplay from an iPhone etc. What I try to do is the opposite: see an airplay device such as a HomePod speaker as an available player in Sense to play music from the server to such device... This is a functionality currently not available in Sense. So far, the only way is to have iPeng running on the phone, (and playing music if I want to use the same device) and then go to Sense to select the iPhone as player. Then from the iPhone, I can airplay top the HomePod. Not very practical nor stable...


I think that the Airplay Bridge plugin (https://github.com/philippe44/LMS-Raop) may do what I need, but I do not know if this is supported by Sense and have not risked testing it...

I does say that it "Allows AirPlay players to be used by Logitech Media Server, as a normal Logitech SqueezeBox. It provides synchronisation, replaygain, gapless, fade in/out/cross and all other LMS goodies. AirPlay remotes can be used as well"...

Please let me know if this is something I could test.

Thanks

Hi guardajoias, apologies - you're quite right, it was the Airplay Bridge that i meant. I keep forgetting which one is for Airplay sending, and which one is for Airplay receiving...

Anyway, on my demo ZEN Mk3 here at the office i have just enabled this Airplay Bridge plugin on LMS plugins page and hit Apply. This seemed unresponsive and made the Plugins page seemingly stop responsive. However, a manual reboot of the ZEN via Sense, and upon reboot i was able to immediately choose between the two Airplay systems i have here (Bowers Formation Flex, and KEF LSX) and am playing CDs from the ZEN via Airplay to the LSX as we speak. Access back to the plugins page is also fine and back to normal.

So, i would say this is okay to test. I would perhaps make sure SenseUPnP is disabled first if you want to stay on the safe side - i did this because it would be especially confusing on the KEF LSX which is both an Airplay and UPnP receiver (so would receive player duplication via Sense).
Give it a try and let us know how you get on!

 

[guardajoias]

Yes! that works! It has a few quirks but in the end the result is great: I did not have any freezing of the plugin page but it took a bit of tweaking the settings of the plugin to make it work, mostly along the instructions for it. I had to load the configuration file, and go into the settings of one of the individual HomePod to enable it. The good things that you can select which devices will appear and which will be ignored. (You can also rename the devices which is fortunate as some come up with obscure names at first). For devices that work in both Airplay and UPnP, you can disable the Airplay. Then when I restarted the Zenith, the UPnP device had at first also disappeared and I had to re-enable it in UPnP. Not sure exactly what happened and what fixed it I ended up disabling and re-enabling the Sense UPnP and then also redoing the list of enabled devices in Audio settings. However, once every thing is set, it seems very stable and is certainly very convenient! I can finally forget iPeng.

So it seems that maybe with some modest adjustments, you could use this as the basis for an official solution that could unlock airplay devices in Sense

Thanks again for your support. I will continue to test this and report but so far so good!

 

[guardajoias]

OK, so here is an update.

Generally, the Airplay Bridge plugin works very well and is remarkably stable. Players always showing, and music streaming is perfect all the time.

As noted above, the initial setting up is a bit tricky because it is necessary to go into the settings of the plugin in LMS and select each device and in the individual settings of each device make sure the ones you want are set to "player is enabled".

One issue I noted today, is that after applying the 3.0.2 update to Sense, my Airplay and UPnP players were gone. For the UPnP, I just had to go and check it into the Sense settings, but for the Airplay devices, I had to go back into the plugin settings. All is back to normal, but obviously not very user-friendly.

Ideally at some point, Sense can include directly the ability to stream to Airplay (2?) but if done through the plugin, it would be great to include an interface for enabling devices in Sense (as you did for UPnP) rather than have to dig directly into the settings of the plugin in the LMS interface.

 

[Stephen Healy]

Thanks for the feedback, this is all good to know and serves as useful testing.
It's certainly something for our consideration, though it's something we do need to be mindful of in terms of official integration into our own app. It's a third-party plugin after all, so certain things go beyond our control like new updates or direction of development.
Nonetheless, this plugin sounds like something we can still recommend to users with a decent degree of confidence based on your experience and feedback, so this is still very helpful. Thanks!

 

[guardajoias]

Glad to report that 3.0.3 did not upset the available players! It kept USB, UPnP and AirPlay perfectly. Thanks!