Very newbie question: how do I tell if minimstreamer is runnng?

[pete_w]

Apologies for what might be a very stupid question. Background: I'm brand-new to minimserver, I'm being pushed into it because I've just been lent a networked DAC (dcs Rossini) to evaluate over Xmas, and so I'm being forced away from my old Squeezeserver architecture and am trying to rush things.

This morning I installed minimserver 2.2 on my DSM7 Synology NAS and took out a trial license.

FLAC files sound very noticeably worse when streamed from minimserver to the DAC rather than from squuezeserver to the squeeze client and then to the DAC over USB. One key difference is that I transcode from flac to PCM on the squeezeserver, so the DAC just gets PCM, not flac. Maybe that's a clue?

So I noted that there's a minimstreamer component, so I attempted to install and enable it, and simply put one entry flac:wav24 into the stream.transcode box and clicked restart.

How do I tell if it's doing anything? The NAS box's network resource monitor suggests that it's exporting around 90kB/s, which doesn't sound like enough for a de-FLAC'd CD, especially one that's supposedly going to 24bit. When I ply a CD that's been ripped to WAV, by contrast, the Synology reports 176kB/s which seems pretty much bang-on for 2 x 16 x 44.1.

So my conclusion is that I haven't configured minimstreamer correctly (or at all :-))

All suggestions gratefull received.

Many thanks
Pete