My love hate relationship with Jinzora continues in my quest for the right method for sharing my music collection, on a Linux server, to my XP crippled work machine. For the indefinite future it looks like I need to keep one XP-crippled machine at home running J. River MediaCenter so that I can (A) listen to my music and (B) update my Last.fm profile; with Jinzora I can only get (A), (B) is a non-option at the moment, even though they insist that it is and it is easy. However, Last.fm doesn’t top my list of annoyances. Here’s what the as_debug.log shows:
9/19/06 1:11:01.02, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.03, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.04, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.04, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:01.05, user:james, jzCreateLink: ssid = e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:10.89, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:11:10.94, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
9/19/06 1:17:44.62, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:17:44.67, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
9/19/06 1:27:44.63, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:27:44.67, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
9/19/06 1:31:01.08, user:anon, mediabroadcast: SID = jza=e413355a887e4ab4a0d56a13cbdfc8c1
9/19/06 1:31:01.13, user:james, AudioScrobbler: Starting up (inside startup routine)
From what I can figure out it is generating the playlist and then the AudioScrobbler routine kicks off and then… Well, then nothing shows up at Last.fm.
When Jinzora is running, it is a well oiled machine that can take you to the places you want in style but getting started is a hassle beyond belief. Importing media is a huge pain in the ass. “What? How? All you do is let the little import wizard work its magic! n00b!” Yeah. Right. The wizard works great with small collections as anything over 9k will have it seize up like you shot it with a tranq gun tethered to a taser. the collection I tried importing over-and-over-and-over is only a paltry 23k and to finally get it imported I have to break it up into discrete 4-5k blocks. Not a big deal, I suppose, but one that had me gnashing my teeth for about two hours.
*Sigh*
I’m back to doing research on implementing a robust media serving solution, one that can come close to the functionality of J. River’s Media Center, but I’m not too optimistic.
I agree 100%. Importing into Jinzora is basically impossible. But, unlike you, I found it nearly unusable after importing my 25k song collection. Its home page wanted to list out all the artists. Ha! Where do these guys come from thinking that this works?
http://slacy.com/blog/index.php/2006/09/05/jinzora-still-blows/
The developers even stop by and try to help me. Ummmm, yeah.
I’m using an old copy of Netjuke, but like you, want to write something that actually works. Have you tried slimserver? http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html
Hmmm, I have the home page configured to show genre and clicking on a genre drills into the artist and that renders fairly quickly. One of the reasons it might be slow is that it is using tables the page won’t display anything until the last table tag is closed and in the case of a lot of data that means some waiting. I am surprised to read over at your site that the developer stated it needs a ton of horsepower as I am running it on a PIII 1GHz with 512MB on board and for the most part is pretty snappy. One of the reasons I chose Jinzora was that it is one of the least resource intensive applications out there, granted importing is a drain but after that everything is low impact.
I’ve been eying the slimdevices for a while and might break down and get one in the next year or so. The only thing I didn’t like about the server software was that the interface outside of the device (streaming to work) was kludgy. What I want is a UI that best approximates J. River’s Media Center and so far only Jinzora has got that covered.