[unincognito]

What is Manic Moose?

Manic Moose will be the third major firmware release for Bryston's digital player line up (BDP-1 & BDP-2).  The first was Canadian Beaver (S0) and the second being Loony Loon (S1).  This new iteration will be based on a minimal build of the Debian Wheezy Linux distribution and will contain a number of enhancements based on what worked in the previous major releases and what didn't work.

Why is this post?

To keep BDP customers informed on the status of the project and to get customer input.

How do I get Manic Moose?
In the event the update fails you'll want to make sure your able to take the top off of your unit, to do this you'll need a torx 8 screw driver and some patients/muscles as those screws are really on there.  You'll also need a compact flash card reader to reflash the CF card inside of the BDP that contains the firmware, instructions on how to do this can be found from this link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86196657/DOCS/BDP%20image%20Windows.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86196657/DOCS/BDP%20image%20Mac%20OS%20X.pdf (Pages 3 & 4)
Its software thats still in early development, things are bound to go wrong!

These instructions should provide you with everything to install manic moose without taking your BDP apart.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86196657/DOCS/Manic%20Moose%20Upgrade%20Instructions.pdf

Once you have manic moose installed you'll likely want to upgrade to the latest build, the link below explains how to do this
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86196657/DOCS/Manic%20Moose%20Manual.pdf

Objectives:
-increase reliability and stability (S&B) of the core firmware
-implement Shairplay a open source project to emulate an audio airplay access point
-compile complete builds of MPD 0.16.8 and 0.17.5
-implement DSD over USB to DSD enabled DAC's
-implement a upnp renderer for audio
-expand upon the BDP's NAS connectivity, add support for NFS & AFP
-rebuild and design the BDP's web interface based on a combination of Ajax and Web Sockets (web design is currently being worked on by web designers out sourced from Ottawa.  A basic interface incorporating web sockets has been started)(Current Focus)
-The ability to munipulate tag and album data from with in the web interface.
-Memory Player, when a dvd or bluray drive is attached to the BDP it will have the ability to playback audio from cd's, dvd's and blurays (BOT).  Rather then playing the content from the original media, the content would be copied to system memory or mass storage for playback.
-Automatically generate playlists based on most recently added songs and most commonly played songs

-Web Interface to play back audio files not in MPD's database
-Option to turn on auto update
-Avahi/MPD Compatibility
-Calculate and compare checksum of audio files to online database and/or history to ensure integrity of audio files
-Option to not display currently playing song info from web interface so the settings from the front panel is still accessible

Web Interface that acts like a wizard:
1. you select your songs from your library (create the playlist)
2. select playback options (repeat, shuffle, consume)
3. display the playlist with the cover art


* Playlist support, save playlists to USB drives and a more advanced editor
* ReplayGain as an option in MPD settings
* Backup/synchronization software (rsync) between drives and network shares.
* btrfs filesystem support
* sort songs by resolution
* Support for multiple images in a folder - mostly for the max interface unless you can influence the iOS/android app devs to support the basic names cover, front, back, folder.
* Allow the user to select the preferred cover art name.  Typically the current ripping/tagging programs I use is configured can provide cover, front, back, spine and folder versions and can even provide multiple versions (cover (1).jpg cover (2).jpg).
* Configurable location for album art files.


Objectives Completed
-(S&B), moved user data from image file to a separate partition on the internal flash drive.  Our original idea however Canadian Beaver would kernel panic during start up if there was a second partition on the same drive.  After revisiting this option with Manic Moose didn't have the same issue and we where able to come up with a perl script to re-partition the existing flash drive using a usb thumb drive.  This allows us to keep the partition holding the firmware in a read only state at all times, except during firmware upgrades.
-AirPlay with selectable output devices (shairplay project)
-MPD 0.17.5 configured as below with DSD support
-MPad and mPod self discovery working, turns out you also need to create a mpd services file
-ng-usbmount utility, rewritten to use different techniques for identifying supported filesystems and tested with NTFS with mbr, hfs plus with mbr, hfs plus with guid, fat32, exfat, ext3 and ext4
-ng-brystonpanel, added a new sub menu to go along with drives, playlist and settings; there is now a playback menu that allows users to toggle repeat, random, consume, single, clear the playlist, force a global update of MPD and to switch between an advance/basic version of the drive menu. drive menu (used for selecting music for playback) is being changed around abit to hopefully make it a bit easier to use


Current Work:

-integrating new web interface as pictured below, once we get a bit further into this and develop a method to allow customers to load firmwares from loony loon and manic moose when we begin releasing public beta's.  Also you may wish to invest in a cf card reader and torx 8 screw driver in case something goes wrong.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86196657/DOCS/BDP%20image%20Windows.pdf

MPD 0.17.5 Config

########### MPD CONFIGURATION ############

Archive support:
   (+bzip2) (+ISO9660) (-ZIP)
Autodiscovery support:
   (+Avahi) (-Bonjour)
Client support:
   (+IPv6) (+TCP) (+UNIX Domain Sockets)
File format support:
   (+AAC) (+C64 SID) (+FFMPEG) (+FLAC) (-FluidSynth) (-GME) (+libsndfile)
   (-MikMod) (-MODPLUG) (+MAD) (+MPG123) (+MP4) (+Musepack)
   (-OggTremor) (+OggVorbis) (-WAVE) (+WavPack) (-WildMidi)
Other features:
   (+libsamplerate) (+inotify) (-SQLite)
Metadata support:
   (+ID3)
Playback support:
   (+ALSA) (-FFADO) (+FIFO) (+File Recorder) (+HTTP Daemon) (-JACK)
   (+libao) (-Media MVP) (+OSS) (-OpenAL) (-OS X) (-Pipeline)
   (-PulseAudio) (-ROAR) (+SHOUTcast) (-Solaris) (-WinMM)
Streaming encoder support:
   (+FLAC) (+LAME) (+Ogg Vorbis) (-TwoLAME) (+WAVE)
Streaming support:
   (+CDIO_PARANOIA) (+CURL) (+Despotify) (+Last.FM) (+Soundcloud)
   (-MMS) (+SOUP)

##########################################


Where  we go next is up in he air, but these are our current priorities. Additional objectives will be added as I remember them and as suggestions are posted.

Cheers,
Chris












-

[skunark]

Thanks for the news on the update Chris.

A few minor user convenience suggestions:
* fix the avahi settings so smartphone clients can auto configure vs typing out the hostname or ip address.  This should just work, but for some reason this isn't for the BDP, every other linux mpd server i have works flawlessly and I think this would be a major improvement for new and current BDP owners.
* Enable inotify for MPD so we won't ever have to manually do a db update again.
* If you can work with the app developers, perhaps ask them to help auto-complete the URL for album art when they detect bryston or just as a default.   Also if the BDP-1/2 supports Wake-on-Lan (WOL) that would be an added bonus if the apps cloud wake up the BDP-2.  (pretty sure BDP-1 alix board doesn't support WOL)
* Perhaps overkill but for FLAC users off a way to validate the checksum when requested (i.e trackverify via audiotools) and report errors.   

Jim

[tomsenko]

Hi Chris,

One small suggestion:

For those who have large music libraries, it would be nice to have the option to simply browse the NAS/USB drives without updating the music databases (like through Windows Explorer). For example, If I copy new music to my NAS, it might take an hour before the whole database is updated. Instead it would be much easier to use MAX interface to browse to the respective folder and just play it.

Toms

[Marius]

+1,
would be so very nice indeed. been a longtime wish for me.

I do hope the networking interface-to-be is based on some kind of browsing also, and not based on the current rather user-unfriendly interface.
Please dont forget the BRadio interface!

other than that, judging on the screenshots:  fully understand your relative radio-silence of the last months...
Cheers,
Marius

Hi Chris,

One small suggestion:

For those who have large music libraries, it would be nice to have the option to simply browse the NAS/USB drives without updating the music databases (like through Windows Explorer). For example, If I copy new music to my NAS, it might take an hour before the whole database is updated. Instead it would be much easier to use MAX interface to browse to the respective folder and just play it.

Toms

[So There]

Chris, many thanks for applying your expertise, enthusiasm, and patience to this important upgrade. As our fellow audio enthusiasts have noted, we're very much looking forward to the new firmware and eagerly anticipate posts on your experiences developing this release.

(Can't wait for the down-the-line Hanson Brothers Hockey FW release.  )


Rich
_______________
Whiney Napa Valley

The means — Bryston SP3 | Bryston 6B-SST(C) - L/C/R; 4B-SST(C) - surrounds; 4B-SST(C) - rears | Bryston BDP-2 Digital Player; BDA-2 D/A Converter; Oppo BDP-105 | Paradigm Reference Signature S8 fronts; C5 center; ADP surrounds; S4 rears; two Velodyne DD15 subs | APC S20 | Pioneer Elite PRO-1130

[unincognito]

Chris, many thanks for applying your expertise, enthusiasm, and patience to this important upgrade. As our fellow audio enthusiasts have noted, we're very much looking forward to the new firmware and eagerly anticipate posts on your experiences developing this release.

(Can't wait for the down-the-line Hanson Brothers Hockey FW release.  )


Rich
_______________
Whiney Napa Valley

The means — Bryston SP3 | Bryston 6B-SST(C) - L/C/R; 4B-SST(C) - surrounds; 4B-SST(C) - rears | Bryston BDP-2 Digital Player; BDA-2 D/A Converter; Oppo BDP-105 | Paradigm Reference Signature S8 fronts; C5 center; ADP surrounds; S4 rears; two Velodyne DD15 subs | APC S20 | Pioneer Elite PRO-1130

experiences:

 

[So There]

The usual developer's experiences, eh? Caffeine and sleep deprivation? 

[unincognito]

Just in case no one has noticed, rather then replying to messages with , along with the progress I have been modifying the original post so that all the up to date information is in one place.

Cheers,
Chris

[skunark]

More for the list if there's room:
*Playlist support --  I should be able to save a playlist somewhere, currently the mpd.conf points it to a nonexistent link /var/lib/mpd/playlist.  If storage space is a concern perhaps allow the user to install a thumb drive and select that for as playlist storage.  I haven't tried but even a .playlist directory on root of storage drive could be an option with a .mpdignore defined if needed.
*ReplayGain as an option -- with note that not all file formats support this feature.

Bonus Points and free 1-UPs:
* rsync hard drives between multiple BPDs and perhaps computer/NAS.   I currently have a cron job on my mac mini to do this, but no reason why the BDP can't take over that task.
* ecasound - if you are overly zealous
* btrfs support with weekly scrubbing of the media drive -- I do this along side of the weekly flac checksum checking.   ... I currently have two bad flac files that I need to fix...

--Jim

[unincognito]

More for the list if there's room:
*Playlist support --  I should be able to save a playlist somewhere, currently the mpd.conf points it to a nonexistent link /var/lib/mpd/playlist.  If storage space is a concern perhaps allow the user to install a thumb drive and select that for as playlist storage.  I haven't tried but even a .playlist directory on root of storage drive could be an option with a .mpdignore defined if needed.
*ReplayGain as an option -- with note that not all file formats support this feature.

Bonus Points and free 1-UPs:
* rsync hard drives between multiple BPDs and perhaps computer/NAS.   I currently have a cron job on my mac mini to do this, but no reason why the BDP can't take over that task.
* ecasound - if you are overly zealous
* btrfs support with weekly scrubbing of the media drive -- I do this along side of the weekly flac checksum checking.   ... I currently have two bad flac files that I need to fix...

--Jim

Hi Jim,

your BDP should be saving playlists to an image file on the internal flash drive, /var/lib/mpd/playlist should be a symlink to /mnt/img/playlists.  We do intend on giving end users the option of saving playlists and settings to a usb thumb drive instead down the road in manic moose.  Some of these recommendations are definitely good idea's and i'll see about implementing them.  ecasound i'm not sure about, i'm not familiar with it and from what i have gathered it appears to be a cli based audio editing suite?  It appears to be quite powerful, but i'm not really sure if its appropriate for the BDP's purpose.

Cheers,
Chris

[skunark]

I created the playlist directory and all is well.  Guessing that's a random mkdir bug between upgrades if I skipped a version?

ecasound might be fun way to add tone controls   -- just kidding



--Jim

[Marius]

Wow Chris,

That's some list you're working on. Any chance of letting us know when we're able to test drive?

btw, since you asked: don't forget the Internet radio functionality, can't seem to find it on your list...

and, kudo's for adapting the Apple iTunesy feel in the interface, very pleasing to the eye, and intuitive looking interface

Cheers!
Marius

Just in case no one has noticed, rather then replying to messages with , along with the progress I have been modifying the original post so that all the up to date information is in one place.

Cheers,
Chris

[skunark]

Now that I have the playlist working , it would useful to create playlist based on search, for example:

# create playlist for all id3 date tags of year 2012
mpc search Date 2012 > /mnt/img/playlists/y2012.m3u
# create playslist for all music added (or modified) to drive in the last six months
cd /media && find . -type f -mtime -180 | sed 's/\.\///g' |tee /mnt/img/playlist/Last6months.m3u
# create playlist for all music added (or modified) to drive in the last week
cd /media && find . -type f -mtime -7 | sed 's/\.\///g' | tee /mnt/img/playlist/LastWeek.m3u
# create playlist for all high-resolution files
# seems to be a missing feature to do this... I currently use beets to generate playlists but it's overkill.

Easy way would be to just add this to the startup script, but perhaps an inotify/mpc update daemon or a cron job would be more appropriate.   

--Jim

[unincognito]

Now that I have the playlist working , it would useful to create playlist based on search, for example:

# create playlist for all id3 date tags of year 2012
mpc search Date 2012 > /mnt/img/playlists/y2012.m3u
# create playslist for all music added (or modified) to drive in the last six months
cd /media && find . -type f -mtime -180 | sed 's/\.\///g' |tee /mnt/img/playlist/Last6months.m3u
# create playlist for all music added (or modified) to drive in the last week
cd /media && find . -type f -mtime -7 | sed 's/\.\///g' | tee /mnt/img/playlist/LastWeek.m3u
# create playlist for all high-resolution files
# seems to be a missing feature to do this... I currently use beets to generate playlists but it's overkill.

Easy way would be to just add this to the startup script, but perhaps an inotify/mpc update daemon or a cron job would be more appropriate.   

--Jim

Hi Jim,

Max 2 already has similar functionality, you can perform a search and add the entire results to the current playlist then from there you can save the playlist.  Although you did remind me of something else i want to add to the features list.

Cheers,
Chris

[Alpha10]

Wow Chris,

That's some list you're working on. Any chance of letting us know when we're able to test drive?

btw, since you asked: don't forget the Internet radio functionality, can't seem to find it on your list...

and, kudo's for adapting the Apple iTunesy feel in the interface, very pleasing to the eye, and intuitive looking interface

Cheers!
Marius

BIG +1 on the Internet Radio - Especially if I can listen to BBC stations 

The new interface looks really great 

Cheers

[skunark]

Hi Jim,

Max 2 already has similar functionality, you can perform a search and add the entire results to the current playlist then from there you can save the playlist.  Although you did remind me of something else i want to add to the features list.

Cheers,
Chris

Max 2 is rather limited as it doesn't allow you to search by year and it only saves a playlists and is rather static.   My request is to provide a mechanism for create dynamic playlists as you add new songs to the attached drive, nightly or with a manual update.  Most of this can be achieved with the startup script configuration page, assuming mpc, sed and grep are available with the correct permissions.  (Hopefully with an account that only has read-only access to the music, but can create playlists.)   It would be killer to isolate hirez files and anything added within the last few months and also even by decades (I like to exclude music from the 80s whenever possible).

Also a more debugging type requests.
* all scripts (i.e. albumDB) should report errors to a log (maybe syslog).  I have to repeatedly start the "Build Album DB" to get through the entire file, and on that page it just indicates
* mpd.log is read-only for me, might be useful to use it to log any crashes.

--Jim

[Grit]

BIG +1 on the Internet Radio - Especially if I can listen to BBC stations 

The new interface looks really great 

Cheers

I know this probably won't be something for this release, but it'd help me get rid of another device if my BDP-2 could play songs from my music service accounts, such as Rhapsody, etc. My wife loves the interface her Sonos provides, but I'd be happy to scrap it and just have her use the BDP-2. even for casual "while I'm working on something else" music.

[unincognito]

Max 2 is rather limited as it doesn't allow you to search by year and it only saves a playlists and is rather static.   My request is to provide a mechanism for create dynamic playlists as you add new songs to the attached drive, nightly or with a manual update.  Most of this can be achieved with the startup script configuration page, assuming mpc, sed and grep are available with the correct permissions.  (Hopefully with an account that only has read-only access to the music, but can create playlists.)   It would be killer to isolate hirez files and anything added within the last few months and also even by decades (I like to exclude music from the 80s whenever possible).

Also a more debugging type requests.
* all scripts (i.e. albumDB) should report errors to a log (maybe syslog).  I have to repeatedly start the "Build Album DB" to get through the entire file, and on that page it just indicates
* mpd.log is read-only for me, might be useful to use it to log any crashes.

--Jim

Hi Jim,

You bdp doesn't seem to be behaving as it should be, sounds like your looking in the wrong spot or perhaps your BDP is suffering from some file system corruption.  You may want to run fsck on /dev/sda1 and /live/image/img, also keep in mind the bdp's firmware runs from a squashfs file system stored on the flash drive and as files are needed they are copied from the original source (squashfs) into main memory.  The mpd.log file should be writeable and be full of information and album db should generate a log, granted the display part of it doesn't always work and the original is stored in /dev/shm.  You'll find quite a few temp files in /dev/shm for those that are interested.

Cheers,
Chris

Cheers,
Chris

[skunark]

Chris

fsck did the trick and mpd.log is writeable, as far as I'm aware it's been that way from day one.  Running fsck might actually be a good option if leaving the fstab fsck/fs_passno to 0.

Ah.. The albumdb log file ... I think the albumdb perl script might be better served as a makefile (or scons) with dependency checking per file calling a pruned version of the perl script. In other words, use build dependencies to update/extract the artwork if the image doesn't exist or the media file is newer vs scan every file.   Also an option to extract album art per album vs per file would be much faster and would guess is pretty much most folks need.  Perhaps this is all dealt with the new web interface.   

Jim

[Marius]

HI,

how nice it would be indeed if Max 3 would finally deal with this. Ive had to use Max without any albumview ever since it went into beta, and gave up on hitting the build-button over and over again. Thus rendering half the interface useless, and to be honest, somewhat below par for Brystons reference class. Especially knowing it not te be caused by the actual media files. Mpod/mpad interfaces show them beautifully.

So, fingers crossed on that one! First screen shots look amazing.

Marius

Ah.. The albumdb log file ... I think the albumdb perl script might be better served as a makefile (or scons) with dependency checking per file calling a pruned version of the perl script. In other words, use build dependencies to update/extract the artwork if the image doesn't exist or the media file is newer vs scan every file.   Also an option to extract album art per album vs per file would be much faster and would guess is pretty much most folks need.  Perhaps this is all dealt with the new web interface.   

Jim