Now Playing 2008

[dsmes]

As for the Onkyo all I can say I am in love with this receiver. The quality of its Burr-Brown audio DACs are apparent as well as the video quality of the Faroudja DCDi Cinema chipset to upscale to 1080p.

Seems like the Onkyo lacks HDMI. I just bought the wife a new LED (backlite) LCD TV and was surprised to learn how "out of date" I am with the rest of my equipment... had to buy a new DVD player just to support the HDMI. Now I have to figure out how to get Girder to interface with all the new equipment. Had Sony equipment before and used SLinkE; now I think I'm looking at IR. How's the Ocelet IR engine? Easy to program with Girder?

[jwilson56]

Not sure I follow you. My Onkyo TX-SR707 receiver has six HDMI inputs as that is required for any 7.1 and High Definition audio from Blu-ray like True Dolby or Master Audio DTS.


I just used IR to control it as it was just easy to do for my setup.

[dsmes]

Ahhh- I stand corrected. I didn't see the HDMI jacks in the picture at first.

[jwilson56]

I have updated my Showcase blog on Cocoontech. Recently I added a Shinybow 8X8 Matrix Switch as well as a Grace Digital Audio Internet tuner. Take a look

http://www.cocoontech.com/forums/ind...&showentry=119

[jwilson56]

Well I have decided to upgrade my aging Dell server PC and rebuild the system while it is still running. I have to say that over the years it is easy to forget just how much configurations, applications and plugins there are on a system like this. I think this will take awhile to get just right and a wise move as I have a working system to keep going back to for reference.

[jwilson56]

Well thanks to the great work from harleydude and Tieske8 on the xplLib and the UPnPGateway as well as some example code for parsing XML I now have access to the Pandora Metadata from my Grace Digital Internet Radio. This is an awesome edition to Now Playing since I often find new artists that I like but was unaware of using my custom artist QuickMix station. I can also now perform a thumbs up and down and skip the track.

Thanks again to all those that worked so hard on the UPnp support for Girder!!!

[jwilson56]

Using the UPnP gateway and the XPL plugin I can now get the metadata from most internet radio stations.

[jwilson56]

Some great news... I have now converted everything over to UPnP calls for the Grace Digital Tuner. So no more IR to control it. Wow what a difference it makes. So much faster and more reliable. It took some head scratching to figure out the commands for the menu actions but in the end they are pretty easy when you figure out which of the commands you need (which then gives you more information for the next command) and in what order.

I now have all the Presets, Power On/Off, Power Status, Skip Pandora Track, and Thumbs Up and Down working now with UPnP calls and of coarse the Metadata for title, artist, album and URL link for album cover.

[jwilson56]

Now that I have integrated the GDI-IRDT200 Grace Digital Tuner into Now Playing here are some of its specifications. There are Iphone and Android application for remote control of as well.

General
Listen to over 50,000 Radio Stations, Podcast, and on demand content
Supports online music services: Pandora, Live365 and PREMIMUM SIRIUS internet radio
Compatible with the Grace iPhone? / Touch remote control application
2 line backlit display w/ large font
Displays Station, Song Title & Artist info
Full function remote w/ 10 presets
10 presets on the radio + 99 station folder
Built in FM radio receiver
Audio
1/4" Stereo headphone jack
High quality RCA analog audio connectors
TOSLINK Digital audio connector
COAX Digital audio connectors
FM antenna connector
Supported audio formats: AIFF, AIFC, WAVE, CAF, NeXT, ADTS, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WMA
Supported playlist formats: ASX, M3U, PLS
Supported streaming protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, RTSP, WSMP, Shoutcast
Built in media player streams your audio files from your PC or MAC
Built in dual band equalizer
Up to 24bit / 96K sampling rate via digital outputs
Play music on your SD card. Up to 4 gig support
Netorking
True 802.11g wireless connectivity
Works with all 802.11b/g/n routers
Supports WPA Personal, WPA2-AES, and 64/128-bit WEP encryption
Built-in Ethernet jack
Clock & Alarm
12 or 24 hour clock with date
Clock is auto synched via the internet
5 individual alarms
Wake to buzzer or music
Set each alarm for daily, weekly, weekend, week days or one time
Sleep Timer: 30 seconds to 23 hours
30 backlight brightness settings

[jwilson56]

I have finally upgraded my Now Playing server. The old Dell 4300 has been an awesome PC to say the least and ran 24/7 for all these years with not even a fan going bad. This new server is a lot faster and has 4 cores. Just took awhile remembering all the plugins I had and how they were all setup. I decided to use Girder 5.1 with a fresh install.

I spent today working on a way to mute my Grace Digital Internet Tuner when a phone call comes in. It seems that the tuner's hardware design will only let you use the UPnP 'volume' and 'mute' commands with the headphone jack. The TOSlink or RCA high quality outputs are not effected. Since the tuner connects into the Shinybow 8X8 Matrix switcher it was not as easy as muting a receiver as it could be switched to any of the six zones. So I decided to change the Shinybow plugin to create a pseudo 'mute'. When a call comes in, any of the Matrix switcher inputs that are set to the Grace Tuner are change to input eight which is not used. When the phone is hung up the reverse happens and whatever input is set to input eight is switched back to the Grace Tuner's input. The other five sources that come from JRMC are handled through a win.SendMessage command being sent to JRMC to pause the track being played. Everything is working great now. Just in time for spring when I usually stop working on my project till fall.

On a side note I finally tracked down a final problem with my TTS sound. This new ASUS MB comes with an EPU-4 application that is suppose to reduce power consumption. The problem was it also killed the sound after a period of no console activity. I deactivated it and so far things are working great.