Back online

The system upgrades took much, much longer than expected. If no one else has commented on it, it appears that MP3 functionality has disappeared from just about all of the leading Linux distributions. Avoiding the reasons why this is happening, it creates a number of issues which must be worked around.

One loss is the ability to use LiquidSoap as a source for hold music in Asterisk (even though the capbility can be recovered, it doesn't yet "fit well" with Icecast or Asterisk inputs).

At first, I attempted to use 64-bit Linux, with the objective of using LiquidSoap for a number of features. I had so much difficulty in getting Liq to work that I abandoned the 64-bit effort. Little did I know that it wouldn't work in 32-bit either.

To make a long story short, time constraints have left me with a 32-bit box with a borked Liq (only plays OGGs) and a number of work-arounds to get a few functions (Asterisk, MythTV, etc.) working. I've even resorted to using SqueezeCenter as a hold music source in Asterisk. It's overkill, using way too many processing cycles to provide a single function, but it works.