Bookshelf Apps

SongBook Mac and network problems

December 14th, 2009 0

This is mainly for future reference, and will not be of much interest to users who are not interested in technical details, but I did spend a lot of time tracking down this particular issue, so it is worthwhile making a note of it for future reference.

SongBook needs access to a particular network address to discover network devices. On a Mac there may be other applications that also make use of that address. Applications can share the address for listening, but at least a couple try and grab exclusive access (EyeConnect and Twonky 5). This means SongBook cannot access the network functions that it needs and therefore will not discover any network devices.

The problem is that it is hard to tell what other application is preventing SongBook from running. You can tell though with is command line:


lsof -i4udp@239.255.255.250:1900 +c0w0 -Fc

This will print something like this:


p921
ctwonkymediaserv

That tells us that process 921 is the culprit, and that it is Twonky Server.

The trouble is that this makes it difficult to run a MediaServer and SongBook on one Mac at the moment. This is not an ideal configuration anyway, but it is something that some users want to do, and it may be a good way to get started trying out digital streaming without spending any money on new hardware. We will keep this in mind for future product development and see if we can make this configuration work better in future.

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