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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that the squeezeserver (or more correctly LMS) gets so little attention. It's fascinating that several projects try to build a new framework to achieve multi-room streaming capable systems, while ignoring the existing, well working open source solution and building on that (I'm aware that several of these projects do allow to install LMS, but it's often a somewhat of an afterthought and not well integrated).

If the effort for integrating the different components (MPD etc.), which still is not close to the capabilities of LMS would go instead into improving the front-ends for LMS (which do need an overhaul IMO), we would be so much further.

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I'm a diehard Squeezebox/LMS user still using three Squeezebox devices on a daily basis.

With that said, the synchronized playback has never been really what I would call great. It is roughly in synch so you can go form room to room and hear the same stuff, but when you get to an area where you can hear two devices at once there is definitely a disconcerting delay on one of them. Maybe that's because I've got one hard wired and one on wifi, but I thought it was supposed to correct for these differences.

I currently have about 8 squeezeboxes around the house in three buildings (mostly wifi connected, few receivers, few radios, few touches and one boom).

Sync is one of the features which just work perfectly, beat-perfectly.

Of course when turning on one player it will pause the music for 3 to 5 seconds to catch up but then it just works.

Yes, for the original hardware, with known latency it worked wonders. But software implementations on different hardware stacks, often with i2s dacs that don’t report their latency back to the OS makes for a headache inducing sync.

> improving the front-ends for LMS

Completely agree. I'm a big fan of the material plugin [1], in particular when viewed from a tablet-sized viewport. Easy to setup for family members as no apps need to be installed.

[1] https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material

Yes the material plugin is great! I've started using that as well, however for controlling from e.g. a raspberry pi with touch-screen it's suboptimal (the popupkeyboard does not work for me for example) and it would be nice if volumeio, hifiberry etc. would let you control LMS through their interface.

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