Re: DDAR - First impressions

[Ian Oliver <ioliver.lists@xxxxxxx>]

> > 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.

OK for when I'm putting one with my hi-if gear (and if there was room on my
rack!) but not for other places around the house.

> > 2)
> > It's slow!

> 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.

Must be down to server speed then.

> > 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.

I use playlists for every album so I can choose based on Artist/Album.
These
kind of UI bug suggests the thing needed a wee bit more testing before
release. Have any software upgrades come out?

> > 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.

So my K6 isn't faring too badly!  At least I know not to spend ages
generating
V2 tags as they don't seem to help much.

> > 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.

Guess it's server speed related.

> > 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.

Can we compromise on "rough at the edges" ? :-)

> 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).

I'm not going to go mad as I think there will be something better along
very
soon.

Regards

Ian Oliver
Sunny Leeds, UK
Using Java on Tini for control via Dallas 1-wire