Losing Confidence in Products

[Agrajag]

Just posting a note that I'm getting close to my breaking point with the dB PowerAmp series of products. Lately they just have not been reliable for me and are now creating more work fixing the issues than they solve.

I've posted my issues only to get vague (though well-meaning and positive) feedback that just doesn't solve the problems.

My main music collection is all ripped from CD in WMA 9.1 Lossless format. As I've noted, in detail, I can no longer reliably rip songs from CD's and expect to get accurate tags. This didn't use to be the case but now a slew of songs are missing track info, album year, track title or any combination of those elements.

Synchronizing no longer functions properly between My Music Collection and my iPod (songs are converted to MP3 320kbps to it). Much of it is due to the tagging problem, but not all of it. I have songs that defy any explanation for their being there. I have a U2 song that constantly appears in the sync list and there's nothing special about it. No special characters, no missing letters in titles, no missing entries in tags. I can delete it in my collection and re-add it. I can manually move it to the iPod but Sync always says it's not there.

Songs converted over to the iPod are often dropping tag info on the way over (I just found that this was the U2 song problem).

Worst of all, when I go into My Music Collection and edit Tags, the data doesn't manage to make it to the actual file!!! I notice the tag for a song is missing its track title so I use the interface to add the song title. It appears there. I see it there. I then quit My Music Collection and reload it. The song title it still there. I then copy the song over to the iPod and sync then says the song still needs to go there. I check the actual file on the hard drive and the track title is missing from the tag. ??!?!?! How can I see the track title in My Music Collection under Edit Tag but when I look at the actual file on the hard drive find no track title in the tag?????

This has been going on for months now. I check in from time-to-time to see if perhaps some major new versions have been released to find nothing updated. I haven't checked in a couple of weeks now so if things have changed, great.

I love the concept. I love the features but these things need to work to be of value to me and right now they just do not work and I cannot recommend them to friends. This is no small issue either. I'm the author of the Official Sound Blaster book series so I have a rather long list of "friends" who ask for my input on this sort of thing and to have to send them to other software is disappointing to say the least.

[Spoon]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Perhaps the problem is WMA Lossless...I personally wouldn't use it (because internally I know what a mess it is), switch over to Monkeys Audio or FLAC and your problems will go.

[LtData]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

dAP should update the tags after you change them. It is very likely that WMA itself is the problem. I assume you are using the dAP release 3 beta?

dMC r12 is still in the works and still at an early alpha.

[Spoons]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Perhaps the problem is WMA Lossless...I personally wouldn't use it (because internally I know what a mess it is), switch over to Monkeys Audio or FLAC and your problems will go.

thats an interesting statement. as i prefer to use wma now because of the lossless and lossy choices. so your saying WMA will cause problems? are these problems known to them as bugs?

it will be interesting to hear back from Agrajag, to see if this resolved the issue. if it does i will have to re evaluate WMA myself and do some testing.

the thing is it could be an IPOD problem too and the fact you can't see a song after transfering it leads to more questions.

what is the song title and format? any spaces in the titles?

also Agrajag mentions synch not working with mp3 and surely cant be a wma problem?

[Wayne]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Worst of all, when I go into My Music Collection and edit Tags, the data doesn't manage to make it to the actual file!!!

Don't you have to get dAP to write the information back to the actual file itself as MMC doesn't do it automatically?

Wayne

[LtData]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Actually, I tested this and apparently MMC changes the tags as soon as you click "OK" in the edit tag box.

[Spoon]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

>MMC changes the tags as soon as you click "OK" in the edit tag box.

Unless the file is playing at the time **

** certain audio formats such as monkeys audio have the tag at the end of the file and can be updated even if being played.

>so your saying WMA will cause problems? are these problems known to them as bugs?

There are known unfixable issues with WMA, and put it this way for Monkeys audio there are aproximatly 100 lines of code in our codec, the sdk is very well written. WMA will have close to 5000 lines of code, it is a COM object nightmare.

[neilthecellist]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

There are known unfixable issues with WMA, and put it this way for Monkeys audio there are aproximatly 100 lines of code in our codec, the sdk is very well written. WMA will have close to 5000 lines of code, it is a COM object nightmare.

I second this. I haven't had any good results with WMA... not to mention that it takes 1-2 seconds to play each WMA file.

[Spoons]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

There are known unfixable issues with WMA, and put it this way for Monkeys audio there are aproximatly 100 lines of code in our codec, the sdk is very well written. WMA will have close to 5000 lines of code, it is a COM object nightmare.

well thats a huge difference. i actually havent had any great issues with WMA but no doubt i dont use it enough to find these problems.

but i use WMA for the simple reason of WMA Lossless to WMA Lossy and for the most part just Q-10

it just seemed easier sticking to one codec.

but if your backing monkeys which i know you have done from the start perhaps i will consider this option instead too. i just thought monkeys had some issues there at one stage but that was a while ago now.

and i know flac used to be super fast playback compared to monkeys. but once again it has been a while since o looked at these codecs.

[Spoon]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

The three main contenders are:

Monkeys Audio
FLAC
Wavpack

each has alot going for it.

[Deano]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Seems as Monkey's Audio will never really get support on anything other than computers, I tend not to use it as a Lossless format.

I personally use FLAC (as it's open source, and it is pretty fast to decode on my Rockbox'd iPod) at Level 5. I would imagine WavPack is also a very good contender (I believe it gets better compression levels than FLAC) and has a lossy hybrid mode too. I have never tried it, although it does tempt me regularly.

[Agrajag]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Forgive me for the seemingly harsh statement but dB PowerAmp supports WMA and it's part of the reason I use WMA. To tell me now that it supports it, but not very well, is a bit concerning. I also use it because it works seamlessly with most every player on the market and software available (with the notable exception of Apple products).

Monkey's Audio, FLAC and the others I've tried and they simply do not have anywhere NEAR universal support. I could move to that format and then find problems with Media Player, WinAMP, portables, etc.

Lt. Data, you're correct on the version I'm using.

Razgo, I'm not likely to jump immediately to change. We're talking about 1600 songs and 37GB of data. I really have to give this some thought. I'm having major problems entirely within dB programs even without the iPod getting involved. Simply editing tags is a problem, and it's gotten worse. Ripping songs from Audio Input into MMC (both dB apps) doesn't work. How can this be WMA's fault? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I can't imagine a FORMAT keeps tags from working reliably. Granted I'm a novice when it comes to these issues. Perhaps dBPA simply dumps to some Microsoft utility to create and work with all the files. I assumed it was doing much of this natively.

Let me ask a question about tags. If I go into a file and notice, for example, that its track number is missing and, within MMC I go ahead and change it to the right track, when should the actual file on the disk? I go into the song, I right click on it and choose "Edit Tag". The tag editor appears. I go to track and type "6". I then click Okay and MMC comes back and shows me the song with the track now entered.

I've had times (many of them) where I can make those change, as above, and then use another program to check the file and none of the changes show up.

Deano, can you explain a bit more about FLAC? I know of it of course but having never used it other than for some testing, I'm wondering what limitations I'll run into here and there. You also mention "Level 5". Is that a level of compression? I ask because whatever format I consider, I want to know that it's a 100% LOSSLESS format. I want to know that if the time comes that I want to uncompress the file that I'll have a byte-for-byte replica of the original file before I ripped it.

You also mention a Rockboxed iPod? I'll have to look that up. I guess it can play FLAC that way? I'd been THINKING of Apple Lossless just for the iPod issue (I own an iPod Photo) and have dBPA rip everything to it right now at 320kbps (max).

How is FLAC with other players and such? I can't get much of anything to work with Media Player and when I did try FLAC, the latest WinAMPs didn't like it (plugin was for version 3). This is the sort of thing I'm trying to avoid.

I'm also thinking a ZUNE is in my future (the new MS iPod competitor) and was looking forward to it for better WMA support (better than NOTHING that is).

How's Monkey's Audio with respect to the concerns I've voiced?

Lastly, will it be fairly simple to get dBPA to convert everything form one format to the other and retain all my tags, etc? Will I lose anything going from WMA 9.1 Lossless to APE, for example? I'm assuming it'll be the same thing as if I ripped right from the CD directly into APE format.

[Agrajag]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Oops, NM found out how to batch convert.

[Deano]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Deano, can you explain a bit more about FLAC? I know of it of course but having never used it other than for some testing, I'm wondering what limitations I'll run into here and there. You also mention "Level 5". Is that a level of compression? I ask because whatever format I consider, I want to know that it's a 100% LOSSLESS format. I want to know that if the time comes that I want to uncompress the file that I'll have a byte-for-byte replica of the original file before I ripped it.

Level 5 is just a compression level. FLAC can go up to compression level 8, but of course the higher the level of compression you use the slower the encode and decode will take. All levels of FLAC are lossless! You still get a bit perfect representation of the original source. FLAC is very well supported in comparison to other Lossless implementations. It works on some portable players (including ones from Cowan and Rio) and has support on most media players (either natively, or with a plugin in the case of Winamp).

You also mention a Rockboxed iPod? I'll have to look that up. I guess it can play FLAC that way? I'd been THINKING of Apple Lossless just for the iPod issue (I own an iPod Photo) and have dBPA rip everything to it right now at 320kbps (max).

Rockbox is an open source firmware available for several platforms, this includes the iPod (including 4G Grayscale, iPod Photo, 5G iPod, iPod Mini and iPod Nano). Yes, this allows it to play multiple formats (including, iTunes .m4a, mp3, .ogg, .flac, .wv, .ac3, .mpc and others). It's not fully released on iPods, it's still in a Beta stage, but I think it is very usable.

How is FLAC with other players and such? I can't get much of anything to work with Media Player and when I did try FLAC, the latest WinAMPs didn't like it (plugin was for version 3). This is the sort of thing I'm trying to avoid.

Explained most of this already, but I have had no trouble with it whatsoever. I have managed to get Winamp playing FLAC in the past with no trouble, although I now only use Foobar2000 for my listening purposes.

I'm also thinking a ZUNE is in my future (the new MS iPod competitor) and was looking forward to it for better WMA support (better than NOTHING that is).

Well, considering the Zune is mere rumour at the moment (we haven't actually seen a decent press release I can believe currently) then I wouldn't worry about it in all honesty. At least with a collection in a lossless format, it is very easy to transcode it to other formats with no loss whatsoever. Lossless formats tend to be quick to encode (or at least on my machine), so it will be less of a burden.

With dB it will transfer your tags with no hassles whatsoever.

[Tomb]

Re: Losing Confidence in Products

Isn't 320 k/bits overkill for a portable player?

The higher the bitrate will contribute to a faster battery useage whilst I read on Hydrogen Audio recently that because the player's decoder has more bits to read on the higher encoded files this could contribute to a faster demise of a portable players drive. Unless you are listening in silence and on pretty good head phones I would go for V2 or even V4 if using lame.

Personally I use aotuv at Q3.95 on my i-river.