First Party

[kizer]

Welp had our first party/gathering and Freebox lasted all day and the que had 257 songs in it at one time that I noticed. Its cool, however selecting a song and waiting 3hours to hear it was well odd and cool at the sametime. Randomize the que was set, but man just kept playing and playing.

Good job Barcrest. Your app was definately the life of the party. If/when I get a few more bucks I'll throw it your way just for the shear sake of it. Heck I even had a Microsoft employee there and he said he normally uses Media player for his needs and well hes going to give your app a looksee, but said he cant use it at work. hahahahaha

The only problem I had was somebody saying "Hey since we now have tunes we need to have all of our parties here." NOOOOOOOOOOoO, go home.

[Barcrest]

Excellent dude... Party on!

[coffee]

Hi Barry and Kizer

I can add that my test machine is running now for about 45 days in a pub. It runs 14 hours a day, 7 days a week and it plays 96.4 % of that time (no bull....) and it works perpectly. I am now so confident with it that I'll be removing the backup machine this week from the pub. It,s awesome. If that isn't a testament to a great programme I don't know what is.
Well done Barry. If the donators can only realize what a great programme this is, they'll know it is a bargain.I've seen a lot of jukebox software, tried it and bought it but I couldn't get any of it to do what freebox does. I'm a commercial operator and have been in the industry for many years. I know what I'm talking about, I've seen it all.

So, thanks again Barry.
Coffee

[squirrellydw]

Have any pics?

[coffee]

Hi Squirrellydw

I'll post some as soon as my new site is finished.

[Barcrest]

Hey thanks for the testiment coffee... And well done getting it all set up and working. Looking forward to the pics man.

[kizer]

I would of taken some pictures of people around my Juke, but I was on the couch with a bum ankle. 

[jonfinpausa]

Coffee what OS are you using?

I running W2K and have 4 units running 24/7.If I cue up loads of songs they run with no problem but if I let them in auto play they seem to just mysteriously crash.I cant seem to pin point it to any particular song and I have a buddy who says his will crash from time to time as well.Any idea's?

Barry built me a distro to log the mp3 files becuase I thought maybe it was a trying to play a corrupt file, but that is not the case.Im clueless 

Fish

[coffee]

Hi Jonfinpausa

Sorry, I was away for 2 days. Let's see, I'm using XP on my units. I had an older test unit also running with XP. On this unit I had the same problem as you mentioned. It ran with 128mb ram and the board was a bit old as well. On the new units I used a minimum of 512mb ram with the latest motherboards that I could find and this is what I have in a pub and it's not doing that sort of thing.
I only had the problem when videos where playing and say you scroll through the albums at the same time.
Your problem may be totally different from mine but try and find out if you get some kind of pattern with the problem and try to isolate it.
I hope you'll get it sorted. I think we should get a tips section on the forum where we could post a question with a anser to it. A lot of the questions on the forum I struggled with myself but I just can't remember what the solution where. By posting it on the forum other users can avoid it or get it sorted faster.

Coffee

[kizer]

If I had a list of questions and answeres I'd create a FAQ section on the manual and as well on the forum.

I personally run Win2000
1ghz processor
512meg ram
Generic motherboard
12gig OS drive
250gig MP3 drive
160gig backup MP3 drive

Ive yet to have mine crash while running.

This is a thread I have running and its on my list of things to do or try to do.
http://www.freeboxjukebox.com/Forums/index.php?topic=25.15

[jonfinpausa]

OK the main difference I see is my 4 test boxes only have 256 megs of ram, they are all intel mother boards with at least 1.2GHZ Processors.My mp3 library is also located on a linux server with a samba share and a mapped drive in the windos 2k OS.I dont think the network link is the issue becuase I can duplicate the problem by placing the mp3 libray on the local computer Hard Drive.

I have a new test bed running now on a Dell Optiplex GL520 with 512 megs of ram running win2k.
Lets see what happens.

[squirrellydw]

So do you think its better to run win2k instead of XP?

[kizer]

Personally I think the differences in Os between XP and 2K mean anything since they are so close. I had a bug in one of my files long time ago that would stall Freebox and it would run odd for some reason. If I recall it had some funky characters in the file name.

I did at one time store all my MP3s on a BSD server running Samba and a mapped drive on a XP machine and a Windows2K machine and and both machines ran fine without a problem. I do remember having a file with the funky characters in the file name gave Freebox a hiccup. Hiccup meaning the app would just stop or it would shut it down like it errored out. It happend on both machines and its how I tracked it down. I think there might of been either a * or a / in the file name. I don't really remember thou.

[jonfinpausa]

I have to agree with Kizer, I have not relized any difference in the two OS's

However I have not scene the XP box crash in random play yet either.But it does have 512 megs of RAM
Things that make you go Hrmmmmm...

[kizer]

I know the newest version of Freebox uses around 45-51meg of ram. Depending on your OS it could be killing you if your using 128-256 meg of ram.

I think when Im running freebox, defragging my machine and something else Im using easily 300+ meg of ram. If I could dump 1gig of ram into my old machine I would. Might not need it, but the prices of ram lately its to easy to throw a few bucks at it.

Also keep in mind that XP naturally uses more ram because of the OS