No coverart with NAS

[PeterSt]

Arvind, perfect. One thing though which quite explicitly can matter : the Persist on Keep LAN Services. So what that does is NOT shutting off LAN services when the system ir brought into Minimized Boot State, but (not persist that) shut off those services after all when Unattended Playback starts. So if you make the "Keep" persistent (make the Persists active/red) all keeps on running as with Attended. So this fir sure can matter.
If you have lust for one more attempt regarding that ... yes please.

Kind regards,
Peter

[Rmalits]

Hello and arvind,
it's great that both of you try to find out about this issue!
In my setup, playing music from my NAS in unattended mode, I get the same behaviour as arvind: no wallpaper for flac files, but wallpaper for wav files. Playing from the local harddisk the wallpaper is displayed for both, flac files and wav files.
I also tried to change the buttons for the services, actually not to switch off any of them: again no wallpaper for flac files (only SQ changed to become significantly worse).

The persist button for the LAN services was always on (red).
So I tried to change that to off (blue) half an hour ago for the first time. And that failed in my setup: The LAN connection to my NAS got lost after the first track was played in unattended mode. The audio PC could not "see" the NAS any more. Only a reboot of the audio PC helped in this situation.
Important notice: In my setup everything is conneted directly to the router: NAS, audio PC, remote PC (using RDC over Wifi).
Maybe that is the reason that the persist button for the LAN services has to be on.

Additionally I have got one other problem with the wallpapers:
As already described in my post above: If the wallpaper is displayed in unattended mode (always for wav; from local harddisk also for flac), XXHE restarts automatically a few seconds after the first song starts to play.
When I received the audio PC from Peter more than half a year ago, this was working well for the demo files on the harddisk, but I soon lost this feature, using my NAS and now it even does not work correctly any more for music files from this local harddisk.

Btw: It would be great to see the wallpapers also in unattended mode. But... as SQ is the most important for sure, I got used to live without it. And I somehow have the feeling that too much graphics data being transmitted over RDC would harm SQ (at least a bit).

Kind regards
Richard

[arvind]

Hi Peter,

Sorry, but even with persist activated no wall paper with unattended, with Flac files.

Best regards,

Arvind

[arvind]

Hi Peter,

While we are at this subject, there's another issue; if I minimise RDC on music server ( work on music server laptop) & then maximise it again, the wall paper disappears with Wav files too. With & without persist activated.

Best regards,

Arvind

[PeterSt]

Hey Arvind,

This is because with that activity you're wiping the screen (literally). So FYI : there is no Wallpaper as such; it is a drawing (done by XXHighEnd).

And to be complete : this is only so for Windows 8 and beyond. Prior to that (Windows 7 etc.), it *is* the normal Wallpaper (which can not be "wiped").

Peter

[PeterSt]

There's the field (in Settings) Copy to XX Drive by srtandard (or something like that); what have you set it to ? (active or not). And what happens when you set it to the other state ?
Try WAV with this as well ! I mean, I want to know whether that now maybe stops working too.

"Copy to XX-Drive by Standard" was not set, but when set it doesn't change the problem, either with FLAC or WAV files.
But it does make the whole proces around 4 to 5 times slower.

 
Stanley

I feel that the key to the problem is here somewhere. So I read it all through again, and here is where it all stops. But I'll bet you that someone like Stanley says : "this is too slow now, so I set it back to what it was".
Wrong. Wrong for a basis always, just because it is not supported like that (throughout and in consistency).

So what is actually NOT supported ?
Have the music somewhere on the LAN and *not* engage "Copy to XX Drive by standard".

Read this the most thoroughly and try to understand :

The logic in this little rule is that you won't be able to shut off the LAN (most of the services of it) while playing unattendedly, because logically a next track would not be available when WAV. Why especially WAV ? well, because nothing needs to be done to it, so it nicely stays on the LAN wherever that might be (shared volume on another PC, NAS, etc.) and when the communication with the LAN is cut, no next WAV will be availabe for playback.
FLAC, contrary, has to be decoded and the output always goes to the "XX Drive" so this is now always local. And so, when you state "Copy to XX Drive by standard", then also WAV is copied to local and now all is in the same state. You would now be able to disconnect the network and playback continues (it really will). One thing : no RDC in such a situation. This is how a few services keep on running when you denote "Use Remote Desktop" in Settings.

In this situation you'd have Keep LAN Services active (at the stage of going to MinOS from Normal OS) and Persist needs to be inactive (Persist can be dynamically changed while in MinOS). Yes, I know how confusing this is ... (see picture below).

If in the above situation your NAS has dropped off, it only means that it is not 100% compatible to Windows and I can't help that (because I can't test a 100 different NASes, not even owning 1). But the solution would be to additionally activate Persist (relative to the picture above). Now theoretically SQ is a bit worse, with no idea this can be perceived as such.


So far for some rules. Additionally though, there's something special going on and you can not guess it (but can know it from a longer past) : with the music on the LAN somewhere and when you do not have your XXHighend folder in a RAM Disk, FLAC conversion will be undoably slow. This is related to how the bits and pieces of FLAC decoding emerge and how Ethernet communicates with, say, the internal PC at the destination end (which would be your Audio PC). This culprit does not submerge with a RAM Disk, and it thus does with a normal disk/ssd. Let's say that "undoable" is the 2 minutes Stanley was talking about.

If we all read the above carefully, we can see that nothing really is wrong and I'd say for each of you three situations. Stanley was asked explicitly (quite many things) while Richard and Arvind use the Stealth PC which inherently runs the OS from RAM so there is really no other way and mind you, a RAMDisk is *not* to be additionally created in the Stealth situation, which BTW is about the RAM-OS Disk really.
Let me stipulate that Stanley might be using the settings wrongly at this moment because otherwise it is too slow, but if he wants to sort the problem he too has to comply to the recommended settings first (again, see picture). I mean, only for trials. And might things work lateron, we can always see how to get the NAS faster, which *is* totally slow.
On a not unimportant side note, I suppose that Richard and Arvind already have Copy to XX Drive by standard (which this is about) active, so it would not be the culprit.

Guys, this post is only about some prerequisites, not only for you but also for myself. I am pretty sure it won't solve the problem so I am going to dive in the program now to look for "something".

Regards,
Peter

[arvind]

Hi Peter,

You're right "copy to xx drive by std" is active.

Thanks for the wallpaper erasing explanation.

Best regards,

Arvind

[Rmalits]

Hi Peter,

thx a lot for your so detailed explanations!

Yes, you are right, "Copy to XX drive by std" is active.

Peter, I didn't answer yet one of your questions from a post above:
"Start playback during conversion" is off and always had been off.

Kind regards
Richard

[PeterSt]

Thank you Richard, thank you Arvind.

[boleary]

Just read through this too quickly, so I apologize if this isn't helpful. If you are losing the NAS or RDC connection during playback have you designated the audiopc and or the NAS as a device that is allowed to pass through your antivirus firewall on the music server pc? I had problems losing my RDC connection during unattended playback until, in my antivirus software on the music server laptop, I designated the audio pc as a trusted device.

[PeterSt]

I have been playing a little without Coverart (Don't do anything Coverart - and rebooted) but ...

- I don't think I liked it better or otherwise such a little that it is not worth while for me, because :
- I can't survive not seeing the volume;
- I certainly can't survive not knowing what is playing.

Ad the latter : Believe it or not, but sound can change so vastly that I don't even recognize a track from being played before, while I played it a 100 times. So I *have* to know what is playing.

Something else is that without Coverart at all, how to select the music ? So that "Don't do anything with Coverart" did not even last two track (selections). However, switch that back on (deactivate the button) and that was solved of course, thinking that the Wallpaper is all what could influence. But as actually already said, that did not last long either - I need to know what is playing and I need to know the volume.

About the speed of volume change : I experienced no difference at all. It is 3-4 seconds but a bit depending where it "falls" in my SFS of 120 (with the notice that the Audio PC runs at 720MHz).
So maybe there is a difference, but then too hard to detect (because relatively fast already).

Regards,
Peter

[Rmalits]

Hello boleary,

thanks a lot for this hint concerning the antivirus firewall!
I read this already a few weeks ago in another topic and didn't pay enough attention to it, because in general RDC is working fine in my setup, even over wifi and only in certain rare circumstances it failed.

I tried it today and yes, you are 100% right!
After installing special rules in the Windows firewall of my music PC (actually it's only used as a remote PC as all music is stored on the NAS), I now can play in unattended mode with switched off "persist" for the LAN services. The music as always is loaded from my Synology NAS. That's great!
So this contributes once more to even better SQ!
And probably there are more situations where RDC will be more stable now and may reconnect better with unattended playback.

Best regards
Richard

[Rmalits]

1) Playing music from my Synology NAS:
When I play flac files in unattended mode, what I do most of the time, no wallpaper appears at all.
When I play wav files in in unattended mode, I get the wallpaper...

Hi Peter,
the posts above describe the wallpaper issue when using a NAS.
In attended mode coverart always works fine.
In unattanded mode it works well for WAV files now, but coverart never shows up for FLAC files, although all tracks are already loaded before playback starts.
BTW, this is the only problem when my audio PC loads the music files directly from the NAS.

Kind regards
Richard

[PeterSt]

Hi Richard,

I am sorry, but this all makes no sense to me. It seems that the only one who can solve this is you, by means of finding the merit of things. Also it looks that you are the only one experiencing this issue, meaning that I don't even think that Arvind suffers from this. But if he reads this I hope he will tell.

Please notice that by now "half of us" draw the music files over the network from a source elsewhere. "Music files" is the contents of a folder (plus sub folders when there). There shouldn't be a difference between NAS or "Music Server PC" in the sense that XXHighEnd doesn't know what either is. It is just a network connection and you can virtualize that a "copy command" copies them from the network source to the Audio PC. So all I can imagine is that the source doesn't let go (does not enumerate) everything and therefore it just lacks later, when needed.

My advice for now : Try to connect to a random other source on the LAN and see whether it makes a difference. Maybe not easy to set up if you actually don't have one (but it could be a laptop), but I don't know what to do otherwise anyway. Doesn't happen often but in this case it does. Sorry !

Kind regards,
Peter

[arvind]

Hi Peter,

Unfortunately I still have the problem of no cover art using FLAC files. Whether the music data is on hdd or NAS, there is no cover art.

Best regards,

Arvind