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Hi gang,
Just yesterday I received an Onkyo TX-NR515 7.2 network home theater receiver. While I mostly bought it for upscaling analog video to 1080p; I did find myself playing with the network streaming options and being outright impressed.
Like many people, I tried doing DLNA streaming with Windows MEdia Player; yeah..it works..kind of. But the majority of my music is in FLAC or a format Windows MEdia Player can't handle. That's when I discovered Asset UPnP; and I was excited when I discovered the dbPowerAmp guys were behind it. dbPowerAmp is a necessary part of my software collection; and after viewing the description; decided it was going to be EXACTLY what I need to make my first venture of breaking my vintage audiophile habits; and start "getting with it".
Now, for the most part; I had absolutely no problems getting it up and running. Told it where my music was; set the formats my receiver doesn't support to LPCM transcoding (thank you for that by the way; really made the value of the program go up); let it catalog all the tracks...and spent hours listening to music being streamed over my network to the receiver. 192khz/24bit FLAC; every random MP3; WMA files; AAC....even the formats that were transcoded to LPCM on the fly. It worked stunningly from the beginning. A small price later and it's now my go-to source for streaming audio over DLNA.
However, I did notice two problems....and one annoyance.
I do a lot of folder/file browsing; in fact, that's the main reason I love Asset. But I noticed a problem; there's often double entries. I'll load a folder; and every track will be listed twice. The one thing I did not do (and thought of while typing this) is the presence of .pls or .id3 files which the server may be picking up on and adding. I haven't checked to look and see which folders with double entries had playlist files. But I ask just in case when I do; that's not the culprit.
However, if it's not due to .pls or .id3 files...what's the cause of this? I would say it's not so annoying; but if I play an album that's got files listed twice...well..it plays them twice.
I also had some issues with the internet radio. Now, my reciever does come with vTuner in it; but I did notice the selection between vtuner and TuneIn didn't overlap much; so rather than being redundant....it's another great feature. For the most part it works; however; I've gotten quite a few "Cannot Play" errors on stations. I did go in to configuration and set "RADIO" to output as LPCM...and afterwards...the stations that did play showed up as PCM on my receiver. I know, for example, the local NOAA radio has a feed on TuneIn; and that was one of the few that after setting RADIO to LPCM didn't work.
Does "RADIO" apply to all the radio stations...or is there a specific format it's talking about I'm not aware of?
The annoyance occurs when I was adding my directories. I keep all my media on an external eSATA drive; and the dialog box Asset uses seems to limit you to not only JUST the local hard drive; but your specific user directory. Now; I was able to work around this by creating a shortcut to my external directory in my user folder; and Asset had no problem accessing it then. I'm sure I'm not the only one who keeps stuff on a second drive; so it might be to everyone elses benefit (and save me some slight hassle going in to command line); if it was easier to access other hard drives/areas.
As of right now; those are the only three issues I've found with Asset and my particular configuration. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
But I'd also like to send a huge thanks and "good job" to the illustrate guys that came up and maintain Asset; this has convinced me that network-streaming is in fact a viable option in the future.
Just yesterday I received an Onkyo TX-NR515 7.2 network home theater receiver. While I mostly bought it for upscaling analog video to 1080p; I did find myself playing with the network streaming options and being outright impressed.
Like many people, I tried doing DLNA streaming with Windows MEdia Player; yeah..it works..kind of. But the majority of my music is in FLAC or a format Windows MEdia Player can't handle. That's when I discovered Asset UPnP; and I was excited when I discovered the dbPowerAmp guys were behind it. dbPowerAmp is a necessary part of my software collection; and after viewing the description; decided it was going to be EXACTLY what I need to make my first venture of breaking my vintage audiophile habits; and start "getting with it".
Now, for the most part; I had absolutely no problems getting it up and running. Told it where my music was; set the formats my receiver doesn't support to LPCM transcoding (thank you for that by the way; really made the value of the program go up); let it catalog all the tracks...and spent hours listening to music being streamed over my network to the receiver. 192khz/24bit FLAC; every random MP3; WMA files; AAC....even the formats that were transcoded to LPCM on the fly. It worked stunningly from the beginning. A small price later and it's now my go-to source for streaming audio over DLNA.
However, I did notice two problems....and one annoyance.
I do a lot of folder/file browsing; in fact, that's the main reason I love Asset. But I noticed a problem; there's often double entries. I'll load a folder; and every track will be listed twice. The one thing I did not do (and thought of while typing this) is the presence of .pls or .id3 files which the server may be picking up on and adding. I haven't checked to look and see which folders with double entries had playlist files. But I ask just in case when I do; that's not the culprit.
However, if it's not due to .pls or .id3 files...what's the cause of this? I would say it's not so annoying; but if I play an album that's got files listed twice...well..it plays them twice.
I also had some issues with the internet radio. Now, my reciever does come with vTuner in it; but I did notice the selection between vtuner and TuneIn didn't overlap much; so rather than being redundant....it's another great feature. For the most part it works; however; I've gotten quite a few "Cannot Play" errors on stations. I did go in to configuration and set "RADIO" to output as LPCM...and afterwards...the stations that did play showed up as PCM on my receiver. I know, for example, the local NOAA radio has a feed on TuneIn; and that was one of the few that after setting RADIO to LPCM didn't work.
Does "RADIO" apply to all the radio stations...or is there a specific format it's talking about I'm not aware of?
The annoyance occurs when I was adding my directories. I keep all my media on an external eSATA drive; and the dialog box Asset uses seems to limit you to not only JUST the local hard drive; but your specific user directory. Now; I was able to work around this by creating a shortcut to my external directory in my user folder; and Asset had no problem accessing it then. I'm sure I'm not the only one who keeps stuff on a second drive; so it might be to everyone elses benefit (and save me some slight hassle going in to command line); if it was easier to access other hard drives/areas.
As of right now; those are the only three issues I've found with Asset and my particular configuration. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
But I'd also like to send a huge thanks and "good job" to the illustrate guys that came up and maintain Asset; this has convinced me that network-streaming is in fact a viable option in the future.
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