S2.10

Thanks, Chris. Downloading... fingers crossed

EJ

And it's up and running. Playing 24/96 FLAC, all seems fine so far.
- Sample rate is showing correctly!
- Genre isn't shown any more. As this never worked for me anyway, I'm not bothered by this
- Metadata that includes a colon (:) still doesn't show the text that is supposed to follow the colon in the main field (the lists to the left and right work correctly).

BTW, I noticed that the beta put the machine in service mode - I presume unintentionally

Cheers,
EJ

Front panel display during startup seems to work correctly again, too. The boot process starts with 'initializing', then 'installing MPD 0.17.6', then an 'N' before showing the solid square indicating the player is ready.
EJ

AIFF files seem to play well.
- Sample rate is displayed, but there is still an error: my 24 bit files show up as 32 bit! [Sample: 96000:32:2]
- An issue that's been with the BDP since 1.x is that a 24/192 AIFF file on a slow-ish memory stick can skip, if it is played directly after insertion. That is still the case, and probably related to media as opposed to the firmware. Waiting a few seconds seem to avoid this issue
- Haven't encountered the situation yet where AIFFs would crackle and pop. This issue came with 2.06 (for me) and seems resolved

EJ

Installed S2.10 2014-12-09 and checked my old issue with skipping on sample rate switch (). Unfortunately issue still persists on AES/EBU output. So I'm back to stable version, sorry.

Chris, thanks for the feedback. I'm on BDP-2, incidentally.

I seem to have lost the ability to upgrade to newer betas; adding #beta to the upgrade page and refreshing keeps pointing to 2.06. Any ideas? edit: solved

EJ

Chris
Just wanted you to know this Beta version is working great! It appears to have corrected all my previous problems with 2:06 on my BDP-1. I even reverted back to LL for a while. But now I have been using 2.10 for 5 days and I'm very happy with it.

The problems I WAS having on 2.06 that are now gone:
front panel display remaining stuck on previous track = gone
front panel display turning off = gone
album art and current playing track information remaining stuck in MM web page = gone
player unresponsive and has to be restarted = gone
biggest previous problem, a custom playlist with multiple songs from different albums played in shuffle mode would always freeze my player = gone

Will you post here to inform us when the permanent consumer version of the firmware is available? Is it even necessary to replace the Beta with the permanent version if this is working so good for me?
Thank you for all your hard work correcting these issues.
Steve

Aiming for a Febuary 15' release, along with the BOT

Chris, under 2.10 14/12/18 the old Daft Punk placeholder is rearing its head again, in TV Mode view (Safari). In the second it takes to get the real metadata to display, the daft punk text is displayed. The track picture doesn't update at all in dashboard view. This seems a regression from 2.10 14/12/09.

Cheers
EJ

Hi Chris
Started to experience front panel display hang ups again. Player moves to next song but display remains on last played. Album art hangs up on MM web page too. But things are better. Before when this would happen the player would become unresponsive and not respond to any input controls either web based or front panel. Now when I notice the display hung up I can skip ahead or jump back a song and it picks up correct info on front display and in MM web page. I wonder if there needs to be an option to apply a 1 second pause between tracks in order for the controll elements to sync with the display? I realize zero pause is preferable for a few cd's but the majority of my library wouldnt be affected and if a pause cured the display hang ups I would be thrilled. Also second the question on the other forum would a larger CF card be a benefit to a BDP 1 running MM?

I tried to update from 2.06 to 2.10 (3 FEB 15) but could n't get it to work. It said 'installed successfully' but in the mediaplayer window i keep getting 'MPD doesn't seem to respond' messages.
Any hints or tips on how to continue? When I return to 2.06 all is ok again,...

Hi Chris,
I've installed S2.10 2015-02-05 and checked album database generation. It is much faster now and is not hanging in the end. The only issues that I have:
1. Album generation ends at 99%. Why not 100%? It is confusing and should be fixed IMO.
2. I still have no thumbnail in left column for AC/DC - only default Bryston icon. I still think that this is because of slash in artist name.

Hope you will fix database soon. I've just noticed that updating database on iPad (with MM shortcut on home screen) after adding single album still hangs on 99%. Sad. I'm back to using MPad. I'm sure that BOT and Tidal are great things but please make music database working. It is still unusable.

Tried to update to 2.10 02/07/15
gives me a permanent N on the player screen.
doesn't work for me. The December upgrade of 2.10 worked fine, but now in order to make my player work
I had to go back to 2.06

ok working again
still wish the album artwork would update when the consume button is active

Other friendly things on my wish list:
I would like to see an arrow on the right side of the player that would widen the file column and then return it to narrow
Classical music names are much longer and are truncated and difficult to pick out the right selection

Also swiping selections away from the playlist often winds up playing that selection instead
I don't like everything about MPAD but their method of removing a track is better I think

thanks

[quote="keithjacksontucson"

I would like to see an arrow on the right side of the player that would widen the file column and then return it to narrow
Classical music names are much longer and are truncated and difficult to pick out the right selection
[/quote]



Seconded!

HI Chris,

Any news on the news page? MM takes me to bryston-bdp-1.local/news form within the system tab, only to show an empty page. Both on Chrome and Safari.

Cheers,
Marius

here's new wrinkle. I updated firmware to 2.10 02-07-2015 .
When playing a DSD file , but only the first one of the day, about 35 seconds in I get a
2-3 second burst of noise. Next time I play the same passage it's not there.
Next day , a different DSD track, 335 seconds in I get that burst of noise . This never happened before in any firmware upgrade. Weird
I went back to 2.06. Will see if it happens tomorrow

<snip>

Hi Chris,

I just uploaded the 2.10 (2-12-15) update. I've started using the BDP-1 as a renderer via JRiver MC and JRemote. Works great. Connection is ethernet over power from the router and to a switch and onto to the BDP-1. Data load on the gigabit switch is light. A couple of other audio components. Happy about the 2.10 update which has helped make the DLNA renderer stick so I don't have to load it everytime.

After the BDP-1 has been on awhile (a couple of hours) it seems to lose its connection. Kind of like the BDP-1 takes a nap (similar to the BDP-1 LED display).

I'll keep messing with it. Keep the updates coming. This is great device. Thanks Robert

My BDP-2 is at 2.06 2014-10-07 , and I've switched it to MPD 18.6

How do I update to 2.10 ?
When I go into the web management interface, it says new firmware available.
But all I ever see is my current version available:

S2.06 2014-10-07
CD Backup App
•Added CD-TEXT support
CD Playback
•Added CD-TEXT support
S2.06 2014-10-06
CD Backup App
•Adjust cdid used to determine backup tmp location
•Adjusted status.php to ignor lines containing no path during db update


BTW I connect my BDP-2 with a Shunyata Etron Anaconda AES/EBU into a Devialet 200 and it sounds killer !!!
And though I'm a lifelong "computer-guy" who also just assembled a new & optimized Intel i7 media PC, I prefer the sound, usability, simplicity of my BDP-2 -> really happy with it !

thanks - Andy in Waterloo

Thanks Chris, got it !

A more serious issue with the view was brought to my attention Friday, so I will be working on that feature next week before heading off to Montreal. There will be a beta release next week, check the release notes.

Cheers
Chris

I've been playing around with:

S2.11 2015-04-24
Build: Manic Moose
MPD: 0.17.6 NEWS
Kernel: 3.16-0.bpo.2-486

and, specifically, TIDAL integration. I assume you are still working on the UI, so I will skip commentary on the UI.

Overall, TIDAL playback works great and sounds just fantastic with clean, if not gapless, song transitions (as far as I can tell with my gapless test tracks). I continue to be surprised how good this platform sounds, so well done!

Last night, I was struggling to get tracks to play at all; I would queue-up and album, tap a play arrow, and the player would cycle through the queue, briefly highlighting each song but playing nothing. Today, however, it all seems to be working just great, so maybe it's a TiDAL issue or maybe it's due to restarting my BDP-1 this morning.

Keep up the great work!

I am using mpd for lossless playback to SPDIF out; not sure if you will continue to offer the choice between mplayer and mpd.

My feedback on S2.11 2015-05-13:
1. New artist view caching feature works, but first artist view rendering after rebuild is still slow - while 100% progress is shown, left column is rendered incomplete and only after about 10-20 seconds has finished updating. Subsequent visits of artist view page are fast.
2. Search feature works, but has serious drawback - it is case sensitive. It's hard to find anything if you don't remember the correct case.
3. Dropdown box on System Log page still doesn't work

My feedback on S2.11 2015-05-13:

ARTIST VIEW

As Vladimir describes, the new Artist View caching feature works far better than previous versions, so well done!

The initial build and population on my BDP-1 with roughly 13,000 FLAC, MP3 and AAC tracks takes more than an hour, from DB Reset to fully populated Artist View (i.e. the left column). But, it works, so thanks for the recent update.

Once the album covers are generated, navigating away and then back to the Artist View is much faster than before and is quite usable - sometimes. Other times, it decides that it needs to re-populate the Bryston DB and the whole process starts anew. I can't believe how much time I've spent this weekend staring at: "album_build_state:1".

An issue with generating the Bryston DB and Album Covers: if any of the enclosing folders (i.e. the genre, artists and/or album folder) are named using certain special characters, the album cover generation will fail.

So, for example, an artist folder called: "Ke$ha" or an album folder called "Beethoven_ Piano Sonatas #8, 14, 23 & 26" will blow-up the album art generation for everything underneath. In these cases, the dollar sign '$' and the hashmark '#' are the offending chars, even though these are legal FAT32 characters; the ampersand seems to be OK.

My guess is that you are not escaping special characters in the leading path string. I manually changed these examples and then reset the DB and reloaded and the art displays in Artist View.

There are also a few other albums that won't generate artwork, regardless of what I try - replacing or scaling the cover art, renaming files, using different tools to update the metadata, whatever. Who knows... I have to ask the obvious question: why don't you just use the Folder.jpg/cover.jpg/front.jpg file included with the audio tracks, if it exists, and then scale it? Are you actually extracting embedded artwork from the audio files?

TIDAL

The short version: there are a number of places where you are displaying collections of albums (i.e. a grid of album art) with no corresponding metadata. For example, My Music / ALBUMS shows a grid of art work, but no artists or album names. Look at the TIDAL app on an iPad to see what I mean; it's very difficult to browse newly discovered without the artist names.

That, and the speed with which elements populate on the TIDAL page is very slow - maybe this is a feature that won't work on the BDP-1 / BDP-1USB.

OVERALL

A great improvement from previous versions and I look forward to follow-on BETAs to see the above issues resolved.

Thanks, Ken

Artists View after reboot

Capture.PNG (248.12 KiB) Viewed 23484 times

After rebooting the BDP-1, some times I see the above in the Artists View. I've been able to repeat this a couple of times.

Also, note the overlap of track index and track title in the display.

Thanks, Ken

Some more weirdness with latest beta (S2.13 2015-05-20) - updating artist view after adding single album gives me 3(!!!) warning popups and hangs on 100% forever. But after manual page refresh left column was shown correctly.

I posted ( then erased ) my problem at not being able to update firmware

I checked my BDP-2 network settings and saw that no default gateway was specified ( Static IP ).
I re-entered the gateway, rebooted, and was then able to update to the latest 2.13

All is now good, but when I look at my network settings, it still shows a blank entry for my gateway.
My proper static IP is shown, though DHCP ( not Static ) is set.
However my BDP-2 can still go out and check for firmware.
... methinks there is a bug in the web interface

- Andy

Quick feedback on:

S2.13 2015-05-29
Build: Manic Moose
MPD: 0.18.21 NEWS
Kernel: 3.16-0.bpo.2-486

I was able to generate an album view, using the URL: http://bryston-bdp-1.local/bryston/views/album/

It took a couple of hours to finish updating with about 13,000+ tracks.

I've noticed a larger collection of albums without cover art, but referring to my previous message about failing to escape special characters, it appears that brackets (i.e. "[" and "]") are also causing album generation to fail. When each one of these fails, it's my belief that this extends the time for completion (waiting for a timeout?).

Turns out I have a number of albums with brackets in the folder name; for example: /genre/artist/Some Album [Live]/*.flac

...or...

/genre/artist/Another Album [1 of 2]/*.flac ...and... /genre/artist/Another Album [2 of 2]/*.flac

...as in, CD 1 and CD 2, separated into two folders.

^^^ Addendum to the above:

I went back though my collection and combined a number of albums that had been split into 2 folders (i.e. 2CD collections), removing the [1 of 2] from that album name, removing the brackets from the path name and ensuring that disc numbering was properly set - the albums I modified now properly generate album covers in the Artist view.

I also removed brackets from the path names from single albums; that worked as well. Definitely a bug in the software, with respect to handling / escaping special characters that needs to be addressed, because I have a number of remaining single albums with "[" "]" in the folder name that refuse to generate cover art.

I still have some classical albums that include "#" in the folder/path name, which is the default created by the ripping tool (XLD or iTunes), based on the actual CD/track titles; these continue to fail in album art generation.

Additionally, some MP3s and AAC (from iTunes Store - non-DRM'd) simply won't display album art, no matter what I do - I've tried replacing the album art, scaling it smaller, re-writing the tags with "Tag" or iTunes itself ... all to no effect. Is 600x600 pixels too large to process album art by Manic Moose? I don't think so, because I have other titles with larger art work that process just fine.

Finally, Chris, I would like to send you a couple of these tracks and maybe you can get the bottom of what's happening (and save your customers a lot of frustration).

By the way, Bryston is making good progress, and I like the new album view (http://bryston-bdp-1.local/bryston/views/album/) ... IF you folks can find a way to allow it load in less than a minute, after album generation/caching, similar to the performance of the Artist view. Right now, it's current responsiveness is unusable.

EDIT: whoops... I see that once the artwork has been generated, the Album view loads quickly.

^^^ Addendum 2 to the above:

On the topic of album art generation: I can understand why you are extracting cover art from the actual audio tracks. In the case where a customer copies a bunch of files onto a flash drive and plugs it in, you want to do the right thing during playback.

However, if you traverse into a folder and fail to generate album art (i.e. displaying the "Bryston" default image), why not look for a Folder.jpg (as already listed in the settings) and use that as a fall-back?

That should be done as part of the album db generation

^^^ Hmmm... well, I have a Folder.jpg co-located with each album. They all scale and display within MPad or MPDroid, without exception.

I can also load this same library into MinimServer and Twonky and every album displays cover art across a variety of control points.

Sounds like I am stuck with MPad for foreseeable future, but I will continue to install newer BETAs and we'll see what happens.

Thanks, Ken

Yay!!! Album Art complete.

S2.13 2015-05-29
Build: Manic Moose
MPD: 0.18.21 NEWS
Kernel: 3.16-0.bpo.2-486

Running the latest BETA, I was able to get to the bottom of my album art issues. Using the BETA Albums view, I was able to identify each album with no cover art. In each case, I removed any special characters from the pathname (e.g. "[", "]", "$" and "#") - there were a lot of them, but now it's done. To be clear, the issue is having special characters in the folder name - individual files still may have these characters, as far as I can tell.

Then, I updated my USB drive attached to my BDP-1 and Reset the DB and forced the Album view to update. I was surprised to see the same collection of albums STILL without album art, so I cleaned off everything: removed the USB drive, forced MPD and the Bryston DB to update (which resulted in no music), re-formatted the scratch drive, re-mounted it and set it again as the scratch drive.

Then, when I re-mounted the USB drive, MPD automatically updated itself. When that completed, I reloaded the Artists view from the Media Player page and voila - artwork for every album.

Hopefully my efforts here result in a better product for others. Enough playing with the BDP-1... time to play music!

Regards, Ken