wtfplay project - it's official

[jrling]

5 it is.

The SQ on my rig is stunning.

[tony]

:) Ah tried 5 today and yes better flow and more defined/refined. Thanks Jonathon I had been lazy out on this glad you put a bit more effort in !

[rickmcinnis]

I had started to think no one cared about WTF and then I got a call from Grant in Toronto about this exciting purloined discovery.

Sitting right in front to of us! My "logic" told me 50% was the right proportion and never ventured lower.

Have to say it is stunning (a word I try to only use when it means something) what this does.

While trying to use the PLAYLIST command line that was posted on that site with the ridiculous name (again if Grant had not told me about it I would never know. Good to have audio friends ...) and after this revelation I thought this must be tried.

I could not get it to work with 7.1. I had not bothered to update to 7.2. I thought maybe this only works with 7.2 so I made a disk. Put it in before shutting down to save my settings. Re-boot and return to the same playlist and I think something is wrong with 7.2. It was immediately apparent. I look at the monitor and the priority had not been saved - it was still at 50. Set to 5 and the MUSIC played again. DAMN frd this is quite extraordinary!!!! The improvement is so plain that it restored my faith in my ability to hear again - I have made some really bone eared judgments in the last year or so. I know the ear is made of bone but then so is the head. Maybe this should have been stone-eared?

So in case someone has not seen this - here is the command frd gave for importing your wtfcui playlist into wtfplay:

export IFS=$'\n'; wtfplay $(cat $WTFCUI_PLAYLIST_FILE)

I cannot get the PLAYLIST thing to work. WTF tells me it does not recognize $ and something else i cannot recall.

Has anyone here tried this and any idea of where i am going wrong with this command? Am I missing a space?

The next big question for frd - why did you not make this known HERE first? Was it payback for all of this SD card player obsession here?

For those who tired of incessant fiddling - a simple low power computer using WTFPLAY is completely satisfying and if there is something significantly better I would be surprised. Of course, I hope there is and that it is so expensive I cannot even consider having it!

[frd1996]

All credit for the priority investigation goes to Jonathan. He has made a specific observations of the behavior of the player at different priorities and was persistent with testing different values. He also posted the info here.

Re playing the playlist from the command line. The command that listed looks right and it should work without problem. I recommend trying something simpler first. Try this command:

Code: Select all

cat $WTFCUI_PLAYLIST_FILE

This command prints the content of the wtfcui's playlist on the screen. You should see the paths to your playlist files. If the command prints nothing (you are immediately back to the command prompt) then your playlist is empty.

Once you make sure that your playlist is not empty, then you can play it like this (exactly as you typed, I type it here again):

Code: Select all

export IFS=$'\n'; wtfplay $(cat $WTFCUI_PLAYLIST_FILE)

Spaces are important and use a single quote character around \n. The whole IFS=$'\n' statement is the information for the shell that it should break the command arguments at new line (\n) or at the end of the input ($).

In the next release I will make a script for that and there will be no need to type such complex command like the one above.

[rickmcinnis]

Can't wait to give it another go.

THANKS to Jonathan for being the intrepid one. I am angry with myself for not going further; so very glad that he did not stop.

I sure thought I typed it in correctly.

Heard from Grant and he says that it works just fine with 7.1. He also said it makes enough difference that it MUST be used.

Jonathan, what settings are you using for the other parameters? I am using 2 and 512.

Thanks to all of the WTF stalwarts along with the Professor for his knowledge of LINUX and an ear that gives him such good guidance.

[rickmcinnis]

Well,

These are the messages i get when I think I have carefully typed in the instructions:

cat: can't open '/root/.co '; no such file or directory
cat: can't open 'f/wtfcui.plist' no such file or directory

What throws me is that what it says is so different than the command I typed.

Especially mysterious to this fellow who knows nothing about this stuff is that it abbreviates PLAYLIST to plist.

And the slashes are backwards - again I have no idea what the polarity of the slashes mean.

Do these messages indicate what I typed wrong? Could I have a funny keyboard like the fellow over in STYLEVILLE had? My keyboard is PS2. Could that make a difference?

Let me know, please.

[frd1996]

Hi Rick,

I was nearly half way through my post explaining that your installation may be corrupted, but then I noticed something. The output of the command that you quoted produced two error messages:

Code: Select all

cat: can't open '/root/.co '; no such file or directory
cat: can't open 'f/wtfcui.plist' no such file or directory

That is wrong, and it seems that the content $WTFCUI_PLAYLIST_FILE has been broken in two on letter n - if you concatenate the quoted pats of the error messages, the broken word will be cof - it should be conf.

How exactly did you type the command to play the playlist, especially the IFS part?

The command, again, goes like this:

Code: Select all

export IFS=$'\n'; wtfplay $(cat $WTFCUI_PLAYLIST_FILE)

Here is exactly how you should type the IFS part:

IFS
equal sign
dollar sign
single quote sign (left to Enter key on US keyboard)
backslash (between Enter and Backspace on US keyboard)
lowercase n
single quote sign
colon

Please note, that there are no spaces in this part, especially between the quotation characters.

My guess would be that either you forgot about the backslash (\) character or you added other character between the backslash and n, or simply repeated the n.

The IFS is important and will have impact on other commands in the shell.

[rickmcinnis]

Thanks for looking at my problem so carefully,

I am not at the computer but I typed it in numerous times and looked at it carefully additional numerous times.

I think this evening I will see if using a USB keyboard makes a difference. After reading of the other fellow problem I wonder if there is something going wrong due to a PS2. Worth a try. I can get the command in there with the USB keyboard and then return to the PS2. I like the idea of reserving USB for music only.

I did have a corrupted install disk and then remade it. The corrupted one would not allow one to use wtfsetup - would not accept n for no. It produced different error messages - more like the ones the fellow at STYLEVILLE had. Just throwing this in for fun.

I do know from memory that I got the IFS=$"n\"; as you specified. I had to do it a few times so it stuck in my memory

I did use a colon instead of a semi-colon initially but i corrected that. i think I have it in there correctly but it would not be the first time I have thought wrong.

One wonders with the different spacing different fonts can use if we should not adopt a symbol for a space. I use ^ to signify a space when I write out these commands - export^IFS=$'\n';^wtfplay^$(cat^$WTFCUI_PLAYLIST_FILE) - just to remove the uncertainty of what is REALLY a space.

THANKS! and take care,

PS You are calling the semicolon a colon

[frd1996]

Yes - sorry, I meant semicolon (;)

I do know from memory that I got the IFS=$"n\"; as you specified

IFS=$'\n';

Your last command with ^ characters to indicate spaces looks OK.

[seeteeyou]

While we're aware that WTFplay couldn't support any network connections yet and having an active network adapter might also affect the SQ to a certain extent, wouldn't it be nice to take advantage of Intel AMT instead since it's always on once we've got that enabled on specific motherboards?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_AMT_versions

Basically we just need to get any NUC models listed below or simply take a look at the list linked above, we could simply get any motherboards with one of those "C" / "Q" / "W" series chipsets as well as Intel Core / Xeon processors that are eligible for vPro Platform

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... l-nuc.html

We could actually mount an ISO image remotely and then network boot was working just fine as shown below



Radmin
https://support.radmin.com/index.php?/K ... T-features


Remote Desktop Manager
https://blog.devolutions.net/2016/12/in ... os-android


VNC Viewer Plus
https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/_dow ... df#page=41


Intel AMT / vPro KVM without proprietary RealVNC Viewer Plus
https://www.scivision.dev/intel-amt-vpr ... ewer-plus/

MeshCmd, also called “MeshCommand” is a open source command line tool that runs on both Windows and Linux and used to perform many tasks related to computer management.
https://www.meshcommander.com/meshcommander/meshcmd
https://meshcentral2.blogspot.com/2018/ ... -tool.html

How to install wsmancli/wsman on Linux to access KVM
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/remotely- ... x-desktop/

No need for monitors / keyboards/ USB sticks, get the playlist loaded and then we could even unplug the Ethernet cable afterwards.

Most likely there will be some BIOS options to allow booting without monitors attached, otherwise it's also quite easy to find a dummy plug like this

https://www.amazon.com/CompuLab-fit-Hea ... B00FLZXGJ6