J River Media Center Plug-In Version 2.1.0.6

[Rick Tinker]

Hey Gang,

J River plug-in version 2.1.0.6 is in the updater.

I found that the status information was not accurate with the music that was playing - pretty weird! Got that straightened out and fixed a few other things.

The VR configuration now has prefix AND suffix entries, and if you have multiple zones the suffix entries are used and by default they are in the form of "on (zone name)".

So, for example, if your artist prefix is "play artist" and the suffix is "on zone 1", then your VR string would be "play artist (artists list) on zone 1".

Couple of things to look at: There are warnings about the VR phrases for some of the events being duplicated - need to see if that is due to malformed VR phrases prior to the startup being done or something else. Also, while music is playing, occasionally an error about not being able to delete an album cover art file comes up - appears to be harmless, but I need to figure out what is going on.

Not much feedback so far otherwise - is it working? I am completely off iTunes and SeerAMP now...

[completelyhis]

regarding the previous beta you posted, did you get the repsonse to the help ticket on that, with the newer issue i was experiencing? I didn't hear back from you on it. I look forward to trying out this one as well, thanks for all the work on it!

Ian

[completelyhis]

i noticed this morning that the JRMC/musicpage.aspx?plugin=JRiver+MC&instance=1 page had controls that worked, but when i went the the jrmc status area all the status devices were not accurate. for instance, i played a song using the afore mentioned controls, but the device status didn't reflect that it was being played, it still showed "stopped."

Is this the way it is supposed to be?

[Rick Tinker]

It definitely should not be like that, but check a few things first and let me know what you find: Make sure you do not have two sets of status devices for some reason - I think along the lines I changed the location name that the devices are put into, so perhaps you have two sets - one that is connected and works and one that is orphaned.

Make sure that you check the status devices after waiting a few seconds - I think the devices are updated every 3 seconds, so if you checked them RIGHT after making a change on the control page, then they may not have been updated yet.

Check that the update installer updated the control page - in the lower right hand corner of the aspx page, there is an indicator that shows the instance number and name - see if you have that.

Let me know what you find. I will try it out here.

[completelyhis]

- no secon set of status devices
- i did wait plenty of time
- i didn't see the instance id at the bottom of the page, so it is possible the updater didn't update the control page. how would i go about fixing that?

[Rick Tinker]

- no secon set of status devices
- i did wait plenty of time
- i didn't see the instance id at the bottom of the page, so it is possible the updater didn't update the control page. how would i go about fixing that?

Do you have multiple instances set up? If you do, and you did not see the instance ID, then there are two possibilities: 1. You are using a shortcut to the music page that is based upon an old beta version where the instance parameter is not included - if the URL does not have &instance= in it, then update the URL by using the link that the plug-in provides. 2. The update did not take - check the startup log and make sure of the version of the plug-in. There is no way to fix this other than re-applying the update - perhaps the Music page files are read-only?

I will enclose a picture showing the instance information that you should have.

[bdhall]

A few questions:

How are things going using this plugin with HS touch?

I noticed a screen shot posted yesterday. Are there any others around?

Is there any way to look over the docs first without starting the 30 day trial?

Thanks!
Brian

[Krumpy]

Thanks Rick for putting some focus on this plugin. Really appreciate it.

Just got back from my vacation (just got married) and need some more time to really test it. Just letting you know that there is interest with this plugin.

Two important factors for me. 1) Multizone and 2) at some point being able to install JRiver on a different machine than HS... Then I guess there is 3) ideally each HS user could create their own playlists, etc. Important for little ones in the familiy.

[Rick Tinker]

How are things going using this plugin with HS touch?

Pretty well - had an issue where the playlist selector was not showing/working, but got that worked out. I am currently working with Rich to get the multizone (instance) support working properly - first instance works fine, but multiple instances in the same plug-in was not working really well. Should have that resolved shortly though.

I noticed a screen shot posted yesterday. Are there any others around?

No, as there is really nothing to see. iTunes, WMP, and this plug-in were developed using the MusicAPI, and some common code that we wrote and have implemented in all of the plug-ins. Thus, all three create the same status and control devices, and they all create links to the music control page which is the screen shot I showed. I never use the music control page so I have not yet forced myself to test it a lot (hoping to get some feedback from you all), but beyond those things there are no screens to show really - even the event actions and triggers look a lot like the other plug-ins.

Is there any way to look over the docs first without starting the 30 day trial?

You can install the plug-in and if you know where the docs are you can view them without activating the plug-in, but that is not intuitive. Since I took this plug-in over, I have not worked on the documentation and the previous person working on this had not done anything either. In the current plug-in, I have a document in place which is a copy of the documentation from iTunes as a starting point because, as I mentioned above, they use the same MusicAPI so they have all of the core functions in common. As lame as that documentation is, I will enclose a copy with this post so you can look at it in case it helps you.
Also, since this was stagnate for a while, I suspect that if you have not asked for an extension to the trial before, that you could open a helpdesk ticket and request a 30 day trial extension for the plug-in. If you ask repeatedly you will get asked to buy it, but one extension is not going to be a problem I suspect.

[Rick Tinker]

Just got back from my vacation (just got married) and need some more time to really test it. Just letting you know that there is interest with this plugin.

Hey hey - congratulations! That is good news! The only downside of course is that I have to now mourn the loss of your home automation spending budget... ;-)

Two important factors for me. 1) Multizone and 2) at some point being able to install JRiver on a different machine than HS... Then I guess there is 3) ideally each HS user could create their own playlists, etc. Important for little ones in the familiy.

1 = Done
2 = Probably won't get done for a long time, if ever, but if there is software out there that allows remote control of J River while making it appear as a zone locally, then that might be an option. I have found though that between iTunes, J River, and WMP that J River takes the fewest resources and runs quite well with HomeSeer. A good multi-port audio card or several USB audio devices and there should not be any issues running it alongside HomeSeer as I am doing now.
3 = No can do easily as it would mean having HomeSeer maintain playlists separately from JRiver. Playlists are common between the zones and live in J River, so you can create a playlist named for individuals, and if you do a control page ASP that looks at the logged in user ID, then you will be able to accomplish what you want. Having the plug-in maintain the playlists separately would be something that we would need a lot of requests for before we look at doing it. The event actions and scripting would allow you to play a playlist very easily (I do that today).

[Mountainman]

2 = Probably won't get done for a long time, if ever, but if there is software out there that allows remote control of J River while making it appear as a zone locally, then that might be an option.

I haven't looked at the documentation for JRiver Media Center in a while, but I thought there was a complete suite of commands that could be sent over the network to control every aspect, including play/stop/volume/selection within each zone. Is that not the case?

[Rick Tinker]

I haven't looked at the documentation for JRiver Media Center in a while, but I thought there was a complete suite of commands that could be sent over the network to control every aspect, including play/stop/volume/selection within each zone. Is that not the case?

There probably is, but not sure how that would fix this. In HomeSeer I could "spoof" a zone and use the network commands to control the zone on the remote player, but you would not get realtime status and no album cover art, so what good would that be? So it could send a PLAY command, but could not tell you what song was playing or show you a picture of the album art.

I suspect that there is a way to get the status and album art via the network, but that would mean adding another protocol to the J River plug-in. That is why I would prefer to see if there is software that could "spoof" a zone in J River on the HomeSeer system that actually controls J River on another system - that would allow all of the current plug-in code to work with it.

[Mountainman]

Could the JRiver network command set possibly be used to control the local copy of Media Center (a copy running on the same machine as HS) via a network loopback which means only one protocol would be required (network) to make it work in any case?

[Rick Tinker]

Could the JRiver network command set possibly be used to control the local copy of Media Center (a copy running on the same machine as HS) via a network loopback which means only one protocol would be required (network) to make it work in any case?

I'm not sure, but at this point with the entire JRMC COM interface completely done, the network protocol would be the SECOND protocol no matter what.

[Krumpy]

Rick,

JRiver offices are about two miles away from my work near downtown Minneapolis. Met with them a few years ago.. Good group.

Might be able to help with #2 as I worked on the Musiclobby 3 project. But then, heck, you're a savy developer yourself! You don't need my help. I understand that in the greater realm of things this may not be important to HST. But personally, I myself would rather implement an architecture where non-critical control items (like JRIVER, etc) shouldn't be on the same machine has the critical home controller. That is one of the reasons why Musiclobby is still interesting for that purpose.

Anyways, I am glad that multizone now exists here. I'll play with it when I get a little more time and get the rest of the house re-implemented.