music server questions

  • Thread starter Thread starter jona
  • Start date Start date
J

jona

Hi all,

A friend has a restaurant in which the bar and dining area are seperate.
He has three networked machines, two POS and one 'server' upstairs
from which all transactions are made. He now wishes to control the
music output (in mp3 form) to both bar and dining room seperately,
from the server machine via two amplifiers, one to each customer area.
His motherboard is a 'Foxconn 661M03-G' with onboard SiS 7012
sound... for what it's worth.

My suggestion to him is thus (on the 'server' machine):
-Upgrade the existing celeron processor to a pentuim.
-add at least 256mb to the existing 256mb RAM.
-install an additional sound card.
-use different mp3 players (playlist software), each specifying which
sound device to use.

Further, it is my opinion that the POS software and data access
is not very intensive. Given that I'm able to locate a socket 478
pentium processor, my question(s) are:
1) Does anyone foresee problems with such a setup. I mean, will it
run the music flawlessly ?
2) Should he have his playlists on seperate physical drives ?
3) Would the existing celeron-D, 2.4gig processor be able to handle
the tasks flawlessly ?

Thanks for any help/suggestions
 
Hi all,

A friend has a restaurant in which the bar and dining area are seperate.
He has three networked machines, two POS and one 'server' upstairs
from which all transactions are made. He now wishes to control the
music output (in mp3 form) to both bar and dining room seperately,
from the server machine via two amplifiers, one to each customer area.
His motherboard is a 'Foxconn 661M03-G' with onboard SiS 7012
sound... for what it's worth.

My suggestion to him is thus (on the 'server' machine):
-Upgrade the existing celeron processor to a pentuim.
Click to expand...

No, a waste of money.
Any celeron is plenty fast enough for a couple MP3 streams,
excepting perhaps the very early Celeron 300/333 (which
lacked L2 cache).

-add at least 256mb to the existing 256mb RAM.
Click to expand...


Again a waste money, usually... amount of available memory
will need be considered. Get it set up and running, then
decide.
..
A Celeron 500 and 32 MB of memory could do this fine with
linux. However, practically speaking it might be good to
have enough memory to cache both songs simultaneously, which
will need case-specific considerations. In other words, if
you have 2 MP3 at around 6MB each (or whatever bitrate
used), there's 12MB of memory it would be good to have
available.
-install an additional sound card.
Click to expand...

How is this going to be set up so far as distances from amp
or speakers? Long runs of analog signals are best avoided.
In that case it may be better to have a separate networked
box at the 2nd amp.
-use different mp3 players (playlist software), each specifying which
sound device to use.

Further, it is my opinion that the POS software and data access
is not very intensive. Given that I'm able to locate a socket 478
pentium processor,
Click to expand...

LOL.
Anything more than a Celeorn 500 is overkill, excepting that
Coppermines run cooler per same MHz. If you really insist
on modern performance/parts/technology/etc, then get a
Pentium-M. The goal here should be lowest heat, noise,
expense to run it. Any modern CPU is overkill
performance-wise.
my question(s) are:
1) Does anyone foresee problems with such a setup. I mean, will it
run the music flawlessly ?
Click to expand...

The flaws would mainly be the music quality. If you can
avoid MP3, or use highest bitrate, do so. I won't even get
into licensing issues but the friend may need to consider
that as well.
2) Should he have his playlists on seperate physical drives ?
Click to expand...

No, unless he just wants it that way. Consider that even
cheap/slow low-end modern flash memory is plenty fast enough
for a couple MP3 playing plus playlists. flash media might
even be a preferred way to implement this, if you can keep
the hard drive spun down and it's only reading from flash.

The overall theme here is that the system has no particular
performance needs, unless the player software is horribly
written and needlessly wastefull. The main issues will be
of sound quality. Good sound cards with optical-out (and of
course amps with optical-in) would be one solution. Use HQ,
short cables with/if analog output.
 
Thanks for the reply kony, it sheds a new light on his dilemma.
A real $ saver too ...
Cheers
 
I think, but don't know, that you're likely to have problems trying to
run two sound cards simultaneously. I'd pick up a cheap sound card
(~$20), stick it in the current machine and see if you can get the 2
cards to work. If not, buy the cheapest PC you can find and network it
to the 'server'.
 
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