RE: DDAR - First impressions

["Graham Howe" <graham@xxxxxxx>]

My comments below:
> 1)
> It's big!  I really wasn't expecting something this big, and
> inside the
> box is mostly fresh air.  And the display is tiny.
>
Agreed, though given the choice I would have wanted something the same size
as my other HiFi components, like the Gateway one.

> 2)
> It's slow!  Getting lists of artists or albums takes about 10 seconds
> and getting a list of tracks about 40 seconds. This is with
> about 4.5k
> tracks and about 300 albums.  Fortunately the playlists view (by far
> the most useful) seems much faster.

This is very strange, I have 3000+ tracks and about 250 albums and artist
and album lists are much quicker (pause while I go and time it). I get
artist and album lists appearing instantly (to fast to time) and tracks in
about 2 seconds.

>
> 3)
> The UI is a bit buggy. After a reboot and a view of the playlists it
> keeps selecting one of the playlists while I'm scrolling through the
> list.  After doing this a couple of times and getting sworn
> at it seems
> to pack it in.
>
Not noticed this, but I seldom use playlists at the moment, except for a
party where I will build a playlist for the whole night.

> 4)
> Rebuilding the database of music takes about eight minutes
> and the DDAR
> seems to get confused if it isn't rebooted after this is done. Note
> though that my PC is only a K6-200, which is right at the minimum
> system requirement. BTW has anyone tried ID3V2 tags? Are they faster?
>
All my stuff is ID3V2 tags and my database takes 2m53s to build. However my
server is 1GHz with fast disks and plenty of memory. I would usually reboot
the DDAR following a database build.

> 5)
> Music can skip at the start if the PC is busy, but again this
> could be
> my slow PC.
>
Never noticed a single skipping track, so it might well be your PC. Infact
I
have had DDAR and MusicMatch on a separate client PC both accessing the
same
track from the server, still no skipping.

> 6)
> Random only seems to shuffle the playlist as you load it - I
> was hoping
> to be able to leave playlists running on repeat-all and
> random to get a
> continuously random set of tracks.
>
Not tried this, as I tend to listen to albums in sequence most of the time.

> 7)
> It's utterly wonderful! It really does prove the concept of
> distributed
> music even though it currently implements that concept in a rather
> crude way.
>
With my experience I wouldn't even describe it as crude, but yes it is
utterly wonderful.

> Today some hold start getting drilled in the kitchen to put
> the DDAR on
> a shelf rather than it just chucking around on the surface.
> Sadly it's
> much too big for the gap we had in mind so I get to do lots of extra
> wiring. Oh well!
>
I have yet to decide where all of mine will go, the only one in use at the
moment is in the HiFi rack, but I would imagine one for the kitchen, one
for
the bedroom and one for my daughters bedroom too. Unfortunately I have sold
all the others, because I would really like to have one in the workshop too
(maybe I'll find a way to get one of the Rio units from bestbuy).

Graham