Tidal-Prepare more than one album at a time ?

[acg]

No. If you're "Preparing" 10 albums at the same time (which is possible)

Is it possible?  I always end up with partially downloaded prepare (mod change) albums if I try to do more than one at a time, and if I do too many at once sometimes XXHE will crash.  Maybe I am missing some trick...I just download prepare (mod change) one at a time now.

[acg]

I should add that my internet is cr*p...dropouts are frequent...like two or three times per hour at least...so possibly that has something to do with my Tidal download issues.  Will have very fast internet at the end of this month so hopefully that is actually faster and more reliable than the current service.

[PeterSt]

Hi Anthony,

What do *you* exactly mean by "more at the time" ?
Or put differently : How do you do that ?

Peter

[acg]

Hi Anthony,

What do *you* exactly mean by "more at the time" ?
Or put differently : How do you do that ?

Peter

Hi Peter,

I do my Tidal search and right-click the "Prepare Stream" for the first album I want to listen to, then I do the same for a second or third or more albums while the first are downloading. 

Is this what you are asking?


Regards,

Anthony

[PeterSt]

Anthony,

Yes, that should work. Another means is (allowed to be) start several instances of XXHighEnd and do one per instance (but of course it is allowed to be a group-of).

But can you tell me ... how do you notice the "partially" ?
- is that because XXHighEnd crashed and thus is it clear that it wasn't finished with the album in order ?
- is that because you notice lacking tracks, later ?
- Is that because tracks just play for one minute instead of the 4 etc. ?

The latter one I noticed once myself (for several albums and if it was XXHighEnd failing) and those albums were Prepared "in parallel" indeed. So ...
So I myself still wonder whether the "in parallel" was the cause.
And of course I can re-Prepare them, but the problems is a strange one ... those were Christmas albums and I don't feel like playing those in the middle of March ...

Peter

[acg]

I will do some more experiments now that I know for sure that I should be able to prepare multiple albums in parallel and I will take particular notice of what happens and report back.

When I have had only a partial album download I have verified it by using Explorer to check the number and size of the downloaded files in their appropriate directory. 

At one stage I set about half a dozen Bruckner symphonies to download in parallel and none of those managed to download fully.  The first track or two of most of them managed to download but eventually XXHE crashed and I had to start again, one album at a time.

A few times now I have had a track just end in stuttering part way through and I thought it was to do with the other stuttering problems I have that seem to be related to too low SFS but in fact when I looked at the downloaded file it was too small for its duration and it would end in silence (not stuttering) when played in other software.  To solve the problem I just re-prepare (download) the album in XXHE and all is good.

[acg]

So this morning I decided to gives parallel downloads a try.  I searched Abdullah Ibrahim and started to prepare the last 5 albums in the search results.  Things seemed to be going well until I lost internet and the following dialogue box appears:

Header = "Prepare Streams"

Message = "5: The remote name could not be resolved: '53.audio.tidal.com'  J:\Streaming Temp\Tidal\AbdullahIbrahim - [2014] - The Song Is My Story\Streams\03- Open Door Within.flac  Continue?"

Options = Yes/No


I clicked Yes and then I got four more similar dialogue boxes for other albums say "Timed Out" and "Continue" with Yes/No buttons.  I clicked Yes to each of these and things seem to continue as normal (am watching the files download in their appropriate directories in Explorer - so all is still working).


EDIT:  I lost internet a second time and had a second round of dialogue boxes appear similar to those above which I clicked away "Yes" to continue when the internet came back and shortly after XXHE crashed.

On the 5 albums started the following tracks were downloaded:
  - 1/2/ 4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11 13 (missing 3/12/14/15/16)
  - 1 & 4
  - 3
  - 3
  - 3

[acg]

More observations...

So I tried downloading one album at a time.  Works.

Two at a time.  Works.

Three at a time.  Works.

Four at a time.  Works.

Five at a time.  Works.

Nine at a time. Did not work.  Had an internet outage and the dialogue boxes as described above came up.  Some of the albums had already downloaded but some had not finished.  Checking the track lists for each album against the Tidal data and it seems as thought the tracks that were downloading at the time of the internet outage (and the dialogue boxes that I clicked "Yes" to) are not there, but subsequent tracks in the album are there.

[PeterSt]

Hmm ... So I guess the mechanism at work (which is a bit outside of my scope) is not fool proof when the connection drops.

I'm afraid it will be not so easy to check whether tracks have been done completely. The checking itself maybe is doable, but the synchronization of the lot will get out of hand quickly. Hard to explain, but think about the difference between doing all over for an album once an error occurs (doable if *you* know which albums may have failed hence re-select them), versus doing only that (tracks) which failed. And this combined with XXHighEnd crashing because of the whatever real anomaly in there and not easily being able to register per track whether it was OK from a previous iteration.

Anyway, I think a lot of work while actually the connection crashes ...

Are you 100% sure such a crash can not happen with one album at a time ? I mean, the drop of the connection should happen anyway, although that too is doubtful for me at the moment (the connection might crash because of overloaded bandwitdh requirement).

I'm afraid this post is quite vague, but I wanted to respond anyway, regarding your efforts of reporting ...

Peter

[acg]

Are you 100% sure such a crash can not happen with one album at a time ? I mean, the drop of the connection should happen anyway, although that too is doubtful for me at the moment (the connection might crash because of overloaded bandwitdh requirement).

I am not 100% sure that the crash will not happen with just one album downloading at a time.  It certainly seems safer to do one album at a time, but I do have a memory of one album being downloaded three times...first as part of a larger group of say half a dozen, then by itself (which was still no good), then by itself again (which plays ok).