Issue 74

I’ve been attempting to try out the new artScript feature for web radios.

But neither Lumin.app nor Linn Kazoo display anything for the artwork of the currently-playing song. (They do display the image at artUrl as the artwork associated to the radio station. But the artwork associated to the playing song is blank.)

Is there a commandline (or other) tool that I could use to see whether the artScript output is being transmitted to the CP?

Actually, I think that very few Control Points expect the Radio art to change.

You can test your script with Upplay, I just checked that it displays the current song art.

Actually, after having had a look at it, I think that I don’t update the art URI in all places where it should appear (the art link is set in the data returned by Info command, but not in the currently playing radio, where it is empty, which explains why you have no logo at all probably). I’ll take a better look at this tomorrow.

After checking: the upmpdcli code is ok, but I’m afraid that upplay is currently the only renderer supporting dynamic art for the current radio song. We had talked with the Bubble UPnP developper about his supporting this, but it appears that he had more urgent things to do (which I understand as upmpdcli is also the only renderer to support this as far as I know…). It’s a very simple thing to do for the CP, but I guess that chicken and egg and all that…

Hmm. Curious.

Lumin.app almost seems to be trying to do the right thing. Each time the song changes (as the new song title appears), there’s a brief flash as the artUrl artwork is displayed and then goes blank. The point is that this happens each time the song changes — which seems to indicate that Lumin.app is trying to update the artwork along with the song title.

But thanks for checking … Evidently, this is a CP problem, not a upmpdcli bug.

It’s strange that Lumin goes back to blank… I could understand if it went back to displaying the static Radio logo, but blank is weird. Did you set the artUrl parameter to the static radio logo ?

Correct.

What does upmpdcli send when artScript returns nothing? Clearly Lumin behaves differently in that case.

I think that if the script succeeds but returns nothing, the dynamic image becomes empty. If the script fails, the image is not set (retains its previous value which is initially the static one). Actually, I think that I should change this to set the dynamic image to the static one if the script fails or returns an empty value.

None of this seems to explain why the image goes away. Maybe you could try to return the static radio logo from the script just to see what happens then (in case there is something Lumin does not like with the real ones).

Unfortunately I have no iOS device, so I can’t test with Lumin.

I’ve tried that. Has no effect.

Actually, on closer examination, I can achieve the same effect by putting the iDevice to sleep and waking it back up (in the middle of a song). The artUrl image is displayed alongside the radio station name. After a second, the radio station name is replaced by the name of the currently-playing song, and the artUrl is replaced by a blank.

Presumably what I was seeing above was Lumin using the artUrl as a placeholder while it was updating the current song information (when the song changes). Logically, the only reason to do that would be if it expected to be able to replace artUrl with a more appropriate image after obtaining the updated song information.

That’s what led me to think that it supports (something like) this feature. But who knows what they’ve actually implemented …

this would seem to indicate that Lumin is indeed expecting dynamic information, but that it’s getting it from an interface where it is not set. I can think of at least 3 ways it can get the info, maybe I am forgetting one, I am going to check.

I’ve found another place where I could set the current track art uri, and this seems to have done the trick with Kazoo (a slightly outdated version on win10, I’ve failed updating to the latest).

Can you easily build from git code ? (meaning, are you already set up for this, don’t lose your time). Else I’ll build a package on the Launchpad experimental upmpdcli repo.

I’ll have to install the development tools. (Volumio2, which is the distro I’m using, has Git, but none of the other developer tools installed. I used apt-get to update upmpdcli to version 1.2.12-1.)

Ok, don’t lose your time, I’m already setup for this, I’ll build a package.

OOps question: do you use the raspbian or vanilla debian apt repository on lesbonscomptes ? … Ignore this, volumio is raspbian-based.

raspbian.

So I have uploaded a new upmpdcli package. It’s versionned 1.2.13, but beware that that’s not what the real 1.2.13 will be, so you’ll have to remember to remove this one (dpkg -r) when the real 1.2.13 comes out:

http://lesbonscomptes.com/upmpdcli/files/upmpdcli_1.2.13-1_armhf.deb

And of course, no apt-get, install this one with dpkg -i

OK. Will try it out tonight.

Hopefully I did not mess up with the package build. Every time I stop for a few weeks, I forget everything about this stuff :)

Works brilliantly, now. Both in Lumin and in Linn Kazoo.

Thank you!!

Thanks for your help for fixing this !