Amahitunes No Longer Streaming Music

[hypertense]

I have now updated the wiki at http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/AmahiTunes

hypertense

[hypertense]

I don't believe it!

Having got Amahitunes working by directing it to the samba shares I decided to try and point it to the actual music subdirectory as it was picking up all the deleted music in Greyhole Attic. Initially the Amahitunes server would not restart if I changed the directory, but I found that if I changed the runas option in the config file to myself rather than mt-daapd I could use the directory mnt/samba/Music and Amahitunes would work.

I should have left it at that but didn't.

I then tried to direct it to mnt/samba/Music/MP4 and found it wouldn't work, so I tried to go back to mnt/samba/Music. This also failed, so back to mnt/samba.

Guess what. Amahitunes fails, but in a different way to the original problem. The Amahitunes server can be restarted from the dashboard, but it cannot be found at hda:3689. The Amahitunes front end picks up the songs, but as the server cannot be accessed at 3689 it cannot be seen by iTunes.

I've now uninstalled/reinstalled several times but the result is the same. I've tried all manner of configurations (changing the runas parameter, changing the location Amahitunes points to, etc.) without success.

Here's hoping someone knows something about what's going on.

hypertense

[hypertense]

Looking at the log file mt-daapd.log I have noticed the following message last appeared on 12 October, when Amahitunes stopped being accessible:

Starting web server from /usr/share/mt-daapd/admin-root on port 3689

So it appears that the server has not been starting, even though the dashboard has been showing it as up and running through several uninstall/reinstalls. I deleted /usr/share/mt-daapd before reinstalling Amahitunes so that it would be rebuilt and now the dashboard correctly shows the server as not running.
From the above it appears that the uninstall does not remove all traces of Amahitunes and there is a corruption somewhere. Does anyone know how to completely remove the program so that I can start again?

hypertense

[bigfoot65]

As root user, do:

rpm -ql amahitunes

Then make a note of where all the files are installed. Then do:

yum erase amahi-tunes

Next do:

rpm -ql mt-daapd

Same process to remove any traces.

Then do a reinstall and it should hopefully work now.

What happens with RPMs is the settings are typically backed up my Fedora as rpmsave as the extension or something similar. Many times when you reinstall the RPM, it uses that file versus a clean one. You might consider searching for files with the rpmsave extension and removing them.

Unfortunately this is a bad thing for some apps and good for others. Easiest way to find the files is do:

find / -name *.rpmsave

or something similar to find those files. I do this as a cleanup step periodically on my server. Hope that helps.

[hypertense]

Thanks bigfoot

I followed your instructions to get a clean uninstall and then reinstalled. Changing the music folder in the configuration still didn't go smoothly but I eventually managed to get a working system by adding mt-daapd to the group users.

hypertense

[bigfoot65]

Glad you got it working. We might need to update the wiki guidance for those who might have the same problems you did.

[hypertense]

Unfortunately it isn't quite working yet.

I was so excited to see Amahitunes being picked up by the clients and correctly finding the music that I didn't actually try playing anything (in my defence I was tired and needed some sleep). I now find that there are issues with playback. iTunes picks up Amahitunes, but when I click on it it very briefly (less than a second) shows the music listing before redirecting to the main iTunes library. Songbird picks up Amahitunes but will not play any tracks, giving the error 'There was an error playing "Track Name". The file can not be read'.
When I look at mt-daapd.log I can see the following at the time that Songbird tries to play the music

2011-10-21 13:49:08: 192.168.1.2 logging in as session 3
2011-10-21 13:49:09: Could not find requested item 9961622
2011-10-21 13:49:10: Could not find requested item 10223667
2011-10-21 13:49:11: Could not find requested item 9568273
2011-10-21 13:49:12: Could not find requested item 9437312
2011-10-21 13:49:12: Could not find requested item 9699437
2011-10-21 13:49:12: Could not find requested item 9568514
2011-10-21 13:49:13: Could not find requested item 10092673
2011-10-21 13:49:14: Could not find requested item 9830599
2011-10-21 13:49:15: Could not find requested item 9437190
2011-10-21 13:49:16: Could not find requested item 8258070
2011-10-21 13:49:17: Could not find requested item 10092601
2011-10-21 13:49:18: Could not find requested item 8258154
2011-10-21 13:49:20: Could not find requested item 8258140
2011-10-21 13:49:20: Could not find requested item 8258144
2011-10-21 13:49:21: Could not find requested item 8258134
2011-10-21 13:49:21: Could not find requested item 8258136
2011-10-21 13:49:22: Could not find requested item 8258138
2011-10-21 13:49:23: Could not find requested item 8258148
2011-10-21 13:49:23: Could not find requested item 8258158
2011-10-21 13:49:24: Could not find requested item 8258150

If I copy any of the music to my local drive it can be played with no problems.

The share is set up in control panel to be read by all and I assume that if it could not be read then the files would not show up at all, rather than show up but be unplayable, but perhaps I'm wrong.

hypertense

[hypertense]

OK, I now have a streaming version of Amahitunes up and running. It plays fine on Songbird, although iTunes still has the same problem I mentioned above and will not display Amahitunes for more than half a second. I recall seeing this problem elsewhere. A pity, as I only started all this because my daughter's iTunes/Amahitunes connectivity broke.

The only way I could do this was to point the Amahitunes server directly to the file folder, rather than via the samba mount or /var/hda/music. I also had to modify file permissions directly on this folder. I can't work out why, because EVERYTHING else (squeezebox etc.) works fine by accessing via the share, and as I mentioned earlier the music files were being picked up, although not playable.

All this was made far more difficult because I could not change the mt-daapd.conf file to point the server elsewhere more than once without having to completely uninstall and reinstall the package. Several hours of messing with configurations that should have been done easily.

UPDATE

While I was typing this I tried once more to point Amahitunes at /var/hda/files/music AND IT CONNECTED. I have no idea why, as I haven't changed anything since it last failed to connect except point it directly to the files as described above.

Now all I have to do is solve the iTunes problem that started all this.

hypertense