Asset UPnP on RPi 2

[simes_pep]

Anyone tried running Asset UPnP on the new Raspberry Pi 2 yet?

Would be interested to know what the replacement hardware with quad-core A7 SOC and double the RAM does for the operation of Asset UPnP, in a dedicated 'headless' server operation.

What areas are likely to be improved - completely library rescanning, artwork presentation to UPnP controller, format transcoding?

Not that I have a problem with Asset UPnP R4 on the RPi 1, but if there are improvements to had, it is a cheap to upgrade (£51 including case and new microSD card), plus it depends on what Asset UPnP R5 is going to bring to the RPi platform.

Thanks,
Simon.

[dbfan]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

It should be all around faster on the pi 2. If anything r5 will be more efficient than r4.

[PeterP]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Format transcoding will be certainly improved. Currently we do not enable Opus decoding and realtime MP3 encoding on the Raspberry Pi target due to limited CPU speed; we will make a refreshed build for the Raspberry Pi 2 with these features enabled soon (waiting for my Raspberry Pi 2 unit).

[jr1001]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Hi

Don't be alarmed by the Posts count - I joined specially to answer this.

I can't answer much of the detail, I'll know more later.

Rescanning is amazingly quick and in general use everything seems slicker (mind you that's true of the RPi 2 in general). Until I get a second one I can't run headless but that's with HDMI turned off.
Mind you since I need to login remotely afterwards using ssh to reboot to get HDMI working again I may as well pull the keyboard and HDMI plugs as well. I suspect that won't make a difference.

I have a problem that on the RPi 2 Raspbian rarely auto mounts my USB stick at boot time (using either BLKID or a normal fstab entry). This works 100% on a B+. A crontab entry - @reboot sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda2 /media/music
immediately before the line to start asset fixed that.

I have one album which won't play which plays fine on my B+ -
"/media/music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Oslo Philharmonic Wind So
loists/Dvo&*345;ák_ Wind Serenade; Janácek_ Mladi; Enescu_ Dixtuor". My instinct is its something to do with the path and at the moment I'm blaming the hfsplus file system rather than Asset and I'm going to try migrating to Fat32 when I can.

I've had problems in the past with buffering 192 kHz Flac files (I use 500 meg home plugs) so I down sampled my only album to 96 kHz which is then fine. I shall try reinstating that at the same time.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions.

Regards
John

[simes_pep]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Ok, so is Asset able to leverage the additional cores and run its processes in multiple threads?
I was also wondering given that the Ethernet is still based on the USB 2.0 bus, hence 100baseT, whether it was not going to be Comms bound despite the increase to memory & CPU power and therefore the improvements offered when just operated as a headless dedicated UPnP Server on a network to be somewhat limited.

As I said I am happy with the operation of Asset 4.2 on the RPi, it scans, serves and transcodes formats to WAV.

If there going to be an optimised version of Asset for the RPi 2, I will probably order one, plus I will then have a 'spare', N+1 redundancy and all that.

Thanks,
Simon

[Spoon]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

I am not sure there is a situation where Asset would use all 4 cores, unless transcoding to 4 different players.

We will be getting a pi2 and look to see if a specific version is required. Also note that Windows 10 is released on the Pi2.

[jr1001]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

I have some figures for Rescan All -

All are same micro sd card, headless, default speed and 16Mb GPU. 5704 tracks and 348 albums. Timed manually from the web page

RPi B+ - 8 minutes 28 seconds
RPi 2 - 4 minutes 25 seconds

Re comms bound - I guess that since we now have one cpu for the user app and a further 3 cpus for the no 4 cpu aware operating system that asset can run on one cpu whilst the OS is able to do its thing on the other three. On the old RPi its running everything on one. This is why I hope to be able to use 192kHz Flacs again. It almost worked before (On a UnitiQute 2 if I watched the buffer it ran pretty much full most of the time, dipped down to a half quite often and then very rarely - perhaps once every 15 minutes failed altogether). I shan't get a long enough listening session until Monday night to test.

Regards
John

[simes_pep]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

I am not sure there is a situation where Asset would use all 4 cores, unless transcoding to 4 different players.

We will be getting a pi2 and look to see if a specific version is required. Also note that Windows 10 is released on the Pi2.

Could the scanning be performed in multiple threads? With separate threads each running on a core, you would effectively get great performance improvements over just a faster CPU clock speed and more RAM?
In the same way that dBPoweamp is multiple threaded when converting formats.

Plus when transcoding for a single player, the format conversion could be run in a separate thread to he Asset app, so search/selecting other tracks is not impacted whilst playing.

Simon

[Spoon]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

When scanning the storage is way slower than the CPU, even SSD. If the storage is a standard HDD then using multiple reads from multiple locations will seriously degrade scanning performance.

[jr1001]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

I tried a 1.5 hour listening session last night with the with the Dunedin consort Brandenburg Concertos 192 kHz flac. I had one glitch where the buffer dropped to one half before filling up again with no loss of audio and another where the buffer emptied altogether and I had a 2 or 3 second break. This is worse than I get with it converted to 96 kHz and since I hear no difference between the two at some stage I'll put the 96k version back. For what it's worth I struggle to hear any real difference between cd quality and 96k.

I've still got the problem of the album I couldn't hear despite and I'm now using a usb hard drive with ext2 file system and copying to this using rsync from my mac. Since this works fine on the Pi B+ I'm going to wait a while until raspbian has had the final update and try again.

Regards

John

[simes_pep]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Could the scanning be performed in multiple threads? With separate threads each running on a core, you would effectively get great performance improvements over just a faster CPU clock speed and more RAM?
In the same way that dBPoweamp is multiple threaded when converting formats.

Plus when transcoding for a single player, the format conversion could be run in a separate thread to he Asset app, so search/selecting other tracks is not impacted whilst playing.

Simon

Hi,
I now have my RPi 2, built and configured with Asset (version 4.2 I'm afraid as I want the Artwork handling, plus have some large artwork images in my 30,000 track library, and this version seemed to work the best and the most stable).

There is some improvement in responsiveness. However not quite the huge jump I would expect from going from a single Core to a Quad Core processor. I suspect that Asset is process bound to a single Core.
Could you recompile the 4.2 version for the RPi 2 platform?
Or will you undertake to develop a targeted build for the RPi 2 to utilise multi-threading over the 4 Cores?

Thanks,
Simon

[Maccaa]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Hi Simon, I think our paths have crossed on a certain british...ish Hifi company website when you say Artwork handling did you have issues on 4.4, I found that my Asset fell over after 9500 tracks ( I do try for 1000x1000 artwork), did yours? I have ordered a RPi 2 so I await the response to your question with baited breath.

I am also back to 4.2 now

Andrew

[simes_pep]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Hi Simon, I think our paths have crossed on a certain british...ish Hifi company website when you say Artwork handling did you have issues on 4.4, I found that my Asset fell over after 9500 tracks ( I do try for 1000x1000 artwork), did yours? I have ordered a RPi 2 so I await the response to your question with baited breath.

I am also back to 4.2 now

Andrew

Hi Andrew, yes I am on the Beta testing for their Firmware and Control App releases.

I tried R4.3 when this was released, but was left with some Albums without Artwork due to the change to Album Artwork handling of Compilation Albums, so I returned to 4.2

In terms of the R4.4 and R4.5 release i don't believe this functionality has been changed, as yet, and then I read your posting on the issues with image size. So I will wait for a RPi 2 version of R4.2 (if possible) or R5 when available.

Meanwhile R4.2 does what I need it to do, at present.

Simon

[simes_pep]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

Hi,

NAIM have just released a Beta firmware for their streamers/network players that allows DSD playback.

Does Asset for the Raspberry Pi support .dsf .dff files?

I have been converting SACD ISOs to FLAC 24/176.4 in foobar2000 as well as .dsf .dff files, then applying a low pass filter to remove the ultrasonic noise.
I have some 168 SACDs, which I have kept the original files after the FLAC conversion, so I can replace with the native .dsf .dff when an alternative was possible.

Thanks,
Simon

[Spoon]

Re: Asset UPnP on RPi 2

No only Asset R5 will support.