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[roadkil401]

To start, I was once a diehard foobar supporter.  But I give up with FooBar. I have had it up and working for a bit, but it seems that every time I turn around something else had gone wrong and I don't know why.   So I made up my mind that I will chuck FooBar and spend the money for a JRiver license with the hopes that I can get something that is rock solid stable and just stays that way.

So the question to ask is how would you set it up?  I have two intel NUC's that I could use.

an Intel NUC NUC5PGYH - Intel Pentium N3700 1.60 GHz - 4 GB Ram (might be 8, I can't remember). with a 32gb SSD. with Win10 installed

-or-

Intel NUC5CPYH - Intel Celeron N3050 1.60 GHz 2Gb ram and 64gb HD to run Debian Linux as I read that is the best distro for support with JRiver.

The Win10 box will be also running the Anthem ARC software along with a few other background apps. The Linux box can be a dedicated device all to itself. The Win10 is effectively a faster processor, but the Celeron N3050 has worked pretty fine when I had it running OpenELEC (kodi), so it should be able to handle JRiver as a stand sole app under Debian Linux.

So The ultimate question will be, so I run through the process of setting up Debian on the Celeron?  And what features and functionality will I be giving up in the process of going with a Linux install over a Windows one?   I am mainly looking to get music out of the box, but as I was using this celeron to run Kodi, and I hear that JRiver can do pretty much everything kodi does for watching the occasional movie or TV show that I have on my NAS (mkv), if the Linux install of JRiver will do that, then I will be golden tickled pink and be more than happy to splash down my $100 (cdn) and buy my license.

Are there other considerations of things that I would need to know before I delve in?

[JimH]

Either NUC will work.  We used the Celeron one for the JRiver Id until recently.

The Linux version has video.  It should work.  The other NUC might be better if you plan to do much video.  Either is fine for audio.

[bazder]

I am thinking of installing Ubuntu on a Azule Byte PC and running JRiver to manage audio files on connected drive.  My question is whether I can access JRiver on this mini-PC (running Linux) by using the JRiver app on my iPad?   If I bought a Mac Mini to do the same job I would definitely be able to access JRiver running on the Mac Mini from the iPad - is that correct ?

[JimH]

Any JRiver remote will work with any Linux or Mac or Windows installation of JRiver.

[roadkil401]

Is there any way to try out JRiver on the Linux NUC (even with a very limited capacity) just to make sure I can get it to work?  I guess the cost of a universal license would allow me to give it a try on both.  If push comes to shove, the cost of a cheap Andriod box and run kodi off of that won't be the end of the world.  Would be nice however to streamline down to a single device/platform to listen to my flac collection and watch the occasional tv show.

[roadkil401]

And just to throw one more confusion into the ticket..  Do I need to install a 32bit or 64bit version of Debian?  I read on one of the web pages for here that JRiver is written for 32bit.  https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Linux_System_Requirements  But then on reading the forum there looks to be conversations about the 64bit build of the app.  OK I am really confused.

[JimH]

Is there any way to try out JRiver on the Linux NUC (even with a very limited capacity) just to make sure I can get it to work? 

You can use the Linux version of MC for 30 days as a trial.

[JimH]

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,111373.0.html

[Zhillsguy]

And just to throw one more confusion into the ticket..  Do I need to install a 32bit or 64bit version of Debian?  I read on one of the web pages for here that JRiver is written for 32bit.  https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Linux_System_Requirements  But then on reading the forum there looks to be conversations about the 64bit build of the app.  OK I am really confused.

I've been tinkering with Linux/MC as a Linux newbie for a couple of years now. I've had most of the common Debian variants running MC and they all run well. A 64 bit OS is more generally recommended even with 2 gig ram.

Of all the Debian-based distros tested I settled in with Linux Mint 18 since it (to me) is the most user friendly, and has all packages pre-installed for "mounting" a network drive at boot, but YMMV. This would be needed to access your music using the Linux machine if run independently. Once determined how to do the network drive mounting it can be done similarly across most of the Debian based distros.

As Jim mentioned use the more powerful box for video using Windows, especially if you are a Linux newbie. As an option the Linux box can use the Windows box MC shared library.

[roadkil401]

OK.  I am not totally a newb when it comes to Linux.  I grabbed the debian-9.3.0-amd64-netinst.iso and put it onto a USB stick and got an install of Debian up.  Now I didn't know if there are any requirements for a clean installed that I really need.  I installed it with Gnome as I gathered I might need some form of GUI to work with. 

I had no issue with adding my user account to adm, sudo and audio.  But I just could not get the first step to work at all.  The first part (wget) would grab a key from the website, but the second part sudo apt-key add - would just fail with an error.  I gather that the apt-key command is not valid with my install.  Sadly as the screen is in the basement and my iMac upstairs, I can't remember the exact wording.  Needless, even trying to add the JRiver repositories didn't get me very far with the same error. 

From the instruction document you linked to, it does have the Debian 9.x listed, but I will give 8.10 a try if that is what it will take.   I, however, thing that I might or must have something else not configured correctly as this seems like there is something else at play that is stopping me.

Any help of suggestions on what to try would be appreciated.

Matt

[roadkil401]

I re-installed my Debian just to make sure and this time didn't bother to select Gnome.  And got the same error.  It turns out that Debian 9.3 does not install the 'sudo' command by default.  so you get the error '-bash: sudo: command not found'.  to fix this you need to run 'apt install sudo' to get debian to load the sudo command and then the instructions given will work. 

There is quite the learning curve to get this software to run.  For example, by default it wants to use the Pulse Audio that with my Anthem Pre-Amp will force all speakers to play rather than just giving me the stereo format that the audio flac file is recorded in.  The software is very dificult to navigate as most of the setting are done with a pop out window, and move the mouse pointer the wrong way and the window gets shoved to the background that sometimes is impossible to get back to the front.  But I will say that it does seem to play my music a bit more reliably than I was getting with my FooBar2000 install,  So it will be a project over the next few days to see if I can tame this to work for me.   Guess I will need to spend the $14 for JRmote, but might give the MonkeyMote a try as its far cheeper and I was using that with my FooBar.

[Awesome Donkey]

Yeah, Debian is annoying like that. I tend to recommend to Linux first timers to avoid using Debian and instead use Ubuntu or Linux Mint unless you've got the basic grasp of Linux down.

Nonetheless, I added a note to the Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint tutorial about likely needing to install sudo and add your user account to the sudo group, along with a link to a simple and easy tutorial in step 0.

[bazder]

Any JRiver remote will work with any Linux or Mac or Windows installation of JRiver.

that is quite cool actually (to my mind) if by "JRiver remote" you mean mobile app?  I assumed so but want to clarify you are not talking about some kind of physical remote.  there is no physical remote, right?

[JimH]

Physical or software, any remote that works with JRiver will work for all versions.