Asset uPNP & DLNA

[Spoon]

Re: Asset uPNP

@Marek-f & Offwhite

Try this new release it might help.

---------------------
>would we need to edit that file somehow to match requirements of certain clients?

That is the idea, some player might expect flac, others x-flac...

We supply settings for the UPnP control points to automiatically do as you suggest (ie flac plays native, m4b is >> wav). Just need those control points updated to expect this.

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Spoon,

first of all: have a great christmas!!!!
Then a few observations from the latest Beta-Update:

- Covers work flawlessly, even from folders or filenames, that contain an "&"-character (not possible in Twonky). Great update!

- Having indexed about 8000 from my 12.000+ Songs, I ended up with 351MB+ of picture files - one file for each title. A suggestion: could the covers be indexed by "album", so you end up having just 1 cover as a placeholder for all files from a single album - or is that not possible / does that not make sense for the plans you have with Asset-UPNP? It would save space and ressources (PDA-control points need to load just 1 cover for the playlist of an album)

- Another observation from the view of a PocketPC-user (MDAII/XDAII with a WLAN-Card, not too fast CPU, not too much RAM...): On certain levels, I do sometimes get - in addition to the programmed browsing-choices ("albums", "Album Artists" etc.) - a long list of for examples titles. That list can get extremely long and take a very long time to load, sometimes, the PDA runs out of ressources. Is there a way to restrain that?


Have a wonderful Holiday Season!

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Just an addendum

Another idea could be, to add a full list of a specified item, whenever desired, by editing the configuration file. An example, how that could look:

Genre
Genre/Artist
Genre/Artist/Album
Genre/Album Artist
Genre/Album Artist/Album

---------- versus --------------

Genre +[title]
Genre/Artist
Genre/Artist/Album
Genre/Album Artist
Genre/Album Artist/Album

The first example: browse for example into Genre "Classical" and you will see the option to browse into albums and album artist, but no long list of titles. That way, you prevent a long list of classical titles to be loaded (good for PDAs...)
The second example: browse for example into Genre "Classical" and you will not only see the option to browse into albums or album artists, but you also already get a long list of all classical tracks to choose from.

[Marek-f]

Re: Asset uPNP

Hi Spoon.

I try the new Beta, but my T+A didn't show/take it.



Marek

[Spoon]

Re: Asset uPNP

Updated to R0.8 beta

Download as first message. This update allows the XBox to work, other players such as PS3 hopefully will now work.

Download as first message.

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Hi Spoon,

Running Asset uPNP with the music files on a network share (4000 Flac files) now.
Works well on my Ipod Touch and PlugPlayer, I don't think it should show any cover arts, streaming music is working fine!
One thing though, swedish characters are not supported ie åäö.

Will test on my PS3 later this evening, are report back.

Thanks for an nice beta software!

/Mikael

[Spoon]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

>åäö.

That suggests the PlugPlayer is not decoding the utf-8 unicode data.

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Ok, I guess you are right, will check this also on the PS3.

Thanks!

/Mikael

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

Hi Again,

Some feedback on PS3 and Asset uPNP:

Still a DLNA communication protocol error (-1) on connection.
PS3 sees the uPNP server on pictures,music and video.
No music listed for the Asset uPNP server.
Problem with utf-8 characters, uPNP name is cut at the utf-8 character ie:

a name like "Mickes_Knähund" is displayed as "Micke_Kn"

The PS3 works well if I set up uPNP in Windows mediaplayer and the name is showed correctly, ie as "Mickes_Knähund".


/Mikael

[Neptuni]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

One more thing to inform, utf-8 works well in song names, but not in the server name announced...

/Mikael

[dvdr]

MP3 Clicks at the beginning/end

Quickly, an observation, when streaming mp3 to my Linn DS:
when switching from one track to the next, there is a click/pop between tracks.
With flac, that does not happen. Also, playing the mp3's singularily, no clicks and pops happen, only, if I select the whole album and add it to the DS's playlist via Kinsky.

Settings: Asset uPNP 0.7, default settings, no forced wav, all tracks have been ripped&encoded with dBpoweramp using lame@vbr "extreme"

[dvdr]

Special charachters sorting (letters "é" etc.)

Another observation, whilst running AssetuPNP in the 0.8 version (pretty stable, Kinsky 1.4.1 crashing sometimes with an "outer exception" when browsing too fast, kinsky latest nightly build 1.5 being really slow in browsing):

special characters like é, á, è etc., quite common in classical music, are not sorted in at the place, where I would expect them.

An example: the CD-Title "Réflexions" by "Hélène Grimaud" is not sorted between "Red Letter Day" and "Reiner conducts Wagner" in Albums, but between "Rural Renewals" and "Salt", this means: at the end of letter "R".

Same with the artist: she is set at the end of letter "H", between "Hush" and "Ian Shaw", and not between "Helen Schneider" and "Helmuth Rilling", where I would search her.

Not sure, though, whether this is just a personal expectation, that is not according to official sorting rules....

[JMinSF]

On Vista Ultimate SP1 - stop SSDP

I'm running Vista Ultimate SP1 64. You need to stop the SSDP service to run Asset-uPnP (0.8 beta), otherwise Asset-uPnP crashes instantly. This seems to be a common problem for uPnP servers under Vista, see e.g. http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=134161 .

Once the SSDP service is out of the way, it works very nicely. I'm using XBMC as my test uPNP client under Vista. Initial library scan (~12,000 tracks) from my server was reasonably fast (~ 10'). Response time from the uPnP client is very smooth, even on a moderately large library.

Are you planning on a Windows Server (2003) service packaging eventually? I'm not sure the WHS version would work exactly as-is since it might install some extraneous stuff.

Thanks for an excellent preview of things to come...

[JMinSF]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

A few remarks and questions on 0.8 beta.

1) I like the flexibility of the DB design and the uPnP tree structure. I added new DB fields (e.g. 'ensemble' in FLAC for orchestra) and added them to the uPnP tree, deepened the Composer tree to Composer\Genre\Album - it all worked without any problem. I hope this degree of customization will remain (and even increase) as you go to 1.0...

2) As dvdr mentionned in an earlier post, the uPnP tree sometimes expands down to the track level. I have not been able to figure out in which cases this happens (e.g., listing Genre does not show tracks, but listing a specific genre shows all the corresponding tracks together with the 3 submenus for artist, album and rating). It would be good to have control of whether tree nodes present all underlying tracks or not.

3) Support for the sort order fields would be nice (mostly albumsortorder, because it is the only one that is not obvious). Being able to sort on other criteria such as opus numbers would be great.

4) For classical music, the album and track titles tend to be split in pieces, e.g. album and albumsubtitle, title and part. Being able to pull them back together would be useful. In general, it would be nice to describe how to go from tag fields to uPnP descriptor

5) Warning, mined terrain... One sore spot with classical music and all the tagging schemes is that there is really room for only one artist per track. Some programs use multiple artists (separated by & or /), but there is no agreement on this, and it breaks artistsortorder. The alternative is to use the musician credits field for that purpose, but it is very poorly supported by almost all the application (tagging & serving) I have seen.

6) This may be a side-effect of XBMC. When a node returns a track list and menus, the menus show up at the end of the list. This may require a lot of scrolling (over 1000 tracks of Bach cantatas...) to get to the menu. XBMC offers the choice to sort by name, which puts the menus back at the beginning, but then this reorders the tracks within the album - not good for an opera!

Thanks again for what looks like a very promising new program.

[dvdr]

Re: Asset uPNP & DLNA

A few remarks and questions on 0.8 beta.
1) ..... I added new DB fields (e.g. 'ensemble' in FLAC for orchestra) and added them to the uPnP tree, deepened the Composer tree to Composer\Genre\Album ...

Be careful - there is an option in dBpoweramp ripper, where (in advanced settings for flac) it patches album artist to ensemble, if I remember correctly. So you might end up with orchestras, that are no orchestras... I've added a custom field in dBpoweramp ripper called "orchestra" and fill that manually using EditIDTag after each rip. By manually adding this field into the database configuration file of Asset uPNP and defining a browsing tree element in the other config file, I can access that without problems. This is strictly limited to your installation of Asset uPNP, though, and not officialy supported and read by other servers, so don't rely on any other programs/software than Asset-uPNP to understand that

3) .... Being able to sort on other criteria such as opus numbers would be great....

As above - you could create custom fields such as "composition" and "opus". It's a little more work after each rip, but indexing and later on finding these values is worth the effort imho

5) .... only one artist per track. ....

When ripping with dBpoweramp or editing with EditID, you could delimit track-artists by " ; " and assign a single artist to be "album artist". In dBpoweramps ID-tag-options check the " ; "-option and "import multiple artists from non-multiple-artists-aware programs" - that way, Asset uPNP afaik will support multiple track artists - then it's all about your browsing structure, how to find artists.... Not 100% sure about that at the moment though, I still have to test that, but it should work.
One thing, that I ask myself, though, is support for multiple composers, lyricists and genres. Could they be delimited by " ; "? Often enough, I would sort an album both - for example - under Jazz and Vocal, or would love to have an album show up under Pop, Rock or classical as some sort "main category", but also, when I do a more specific search, have them also filed under more special genres.
Same problem with multiple composers - setting up a tree element "composer" brings up individual and combined works by composers X, Y and Z like

X      work a b c
X;Y    work d
X;Z    work e
Y      work f
Z      work g

etc., and not

X       work a b c d e
Y       work d f
Z       work e g

So, does anybody know, whether that is possible?