XXHighend as UPnP Renderer

[Erwin]

Hi Peter

Been a while since i posted here, too many hobby's for the time i have ;-)

i have a question. Are you familiar with playing music by means of UPnP/DLNA? Either as a Server, Control point or Renderer

but before i go in to detail in how i use this lately for 99% of the time music goes through my NOS1 (without XXHighend unfortunately) i am curious, have you already have considered building a UPnP renderer functionality in XXHighend?

If not, i will explain in detail how i use it and can maybe, maybe, if the downsides are worth it,  be a very conveniant add-on to XXHighend...

Erwin

[PeterSt]

Hi there Erwin !

With apologies for the late response, let's say that I finally digested this and now wonder how you do it, assumed you see possibilities for a. XXHighEnd (this seems clear ;-) and b. with the use of the NOS1.
I should add that 24/768 should be possible or else I think I "know" SQ will be more poor (because of aliasing).

So, let's have it ?


Kind regards,
Peter

[Erwin]

Hi Peter, no worries at all. There is no rush

Now, this will probably be a long post, so bear with me.

The UPnP i'm talking about is the 'network audio protocol' one, often referred to as UPnP AV. Here is a good read about how it works, at least from a user perspective.

Now, in my use case, i only use a Control Point, and a Media Renderer. The control point is where you select what to play, and when you hit the play button, it tells the renderer to play it. Like a remote if you will.

Control Point
This is my Android phone. On this phone i run an app called BubbleUPnP. There are other similar apps, like MConnect. This app lets you map music which is available on your network, but, and this is what this post is really about, also lets you log on to Tidal or Qobuz, so you can access that as well. The UI is not that of Tidal, but that of BubbleUPnP, but the functionality is almost the same. There is a search function, track radio (which i use a lot!) and so on. All your playlists in Tidal are available, and you can create playlists in BubbleUPnP just the same, and they show up in tidal too, so it works both ways so to say.
Now, when i decided what to listen to and press play, commands are sent to the UPnP renderer according to the 'AV Transport Service'.
actions like Play, Pause, Stop, Seek, Volume, Mute, etc are all part of this service.

Media Renderer
In my case the media renderer is the PC where the NOS1 is connected to. There is software which provides the UPnP functionality. I juse JRiver Media center.
When the renderer recieved the information what to play (file location,  volume etc..) it will load the file into memory (i believe), and play it. This works the same with Tidal. I have not looked into whether the file is downloaded first or it is only loaded into memory, but shortly after playing commences the network activity drops very low. At least up to 24bit 192khz is supported(i'm talking about the tidal bit depth), no idea what the limits are, i believe this is the highest available on Tidal?

JRiver provides the UPnP functionality and is also the player. It lets me use Kernel Streaming to the NOS1, and i let JRiver upsample everything to 352khz, there are 2 upsampling engines to choose from.

So, all in all, it feels basicly the same as a phone/tablet with a chromecast, etc.

Getting to the point
Now, what if, XXhighend would be the UPnP Renderer instead? Remote Desktop will no longer be necesary anymore, but UPnP AV services will come in its place offcourse, and i have no idea what that will mean. Also, i'm not 100% sure how the files are brought in, and if Unattended playing would still be possible that way. I would only bother if it is still posible to get 100% out of XXhighend so to say.
As for UI, the possiblity's are endless, but another instance of XXhighend could also be made to function as a Control Point. JRiver has the possiblity to function as a control point, media server, or the renderer

Will this way maybe be an easier way to use Tidal with XXhighend? Both for the user, and you. From the way i see it most of the programming is not seen by the user, requiring no UI related stuff in XXhighend. And maybe the continuous changes Tidal make, gives less of a headache, if at all?

looking forward to your thoughts about this

Erwin

[PeterSt]

Hello again Erwin - Thanks for this all !

In my case the media renderer is the PC where the NOS1 is connected to. There is software which provides the UPnP functionality. I juse JRiver Media center.

But there it goes wrong. At least to begin with.

XXHighEnd is that because of its ultra low footprint for the Sound Engine (you can hardly detect CPU cycles when it plays - even during upsampling to 705.6/768.

There is a reason that I don't allow streaming - this is because it won't sound good at all; you can read about that everywhere, although nobody guesses that this is abou that footprint again.

You have your good reasons to have that UPnP control point, but avoiding a (stupid) user interface for the work involved on my side with only negative (SQ !) result is really not worth the trouble.
Btw, you can use XXHighEnd's "control point" on your phone just as well - just set the proper scaling. Well workable, still not the nicest, and if you reall want to search for music and select it, a tablet still is the best (totally nothing wrong with that).

But whatever can be complained about the user interface, I wouldn't care less once I am used to it (and you are too) if it only brings the better SQ.

N.b.: To picture better what it all is about (about not streaming and such) : XXHighEnd is a pure memory player. So all music you play (e.g. an album) goes into memory first. Some people have applications to even pull the network cable during playback (then no control possible, unless on the renderer machine with a keyboard connect or other tweaks which tweaks are always very audible (SQ gets worse)), so everything matters.

Ever thought of how a USB cable (I don't know whether your have a configurable Lush^2 or ^3) so (more than) vastly can influence SQ ? officially it can't. But everything, really everything matters.

But I sincerely thank you for the contribution !
Peter

[Erwin]

Hi Peter,

And thank you for digesting this :-)

though i'm not sure you fully understand where i'm getting at. This post is by no means a complaint about the XXHighend UI, if i had wishes about that you would have known by now ;-) i care more about the end result, which is is ofcourse enjoying music. To play music from my (network)hard drive i can do everything with XXHighend i would want.

But to elaborate further what this post is about then. I think there are 2 points i'm getting at. The one point is, convenience, who would not want the convenience of a streaming service? Heck, thats why you implemented the Tidal 'download' function in the first place. When i'm on the go or at work, i listen to music via Tidal (as background in a lo-fi envirment) and this provides me with inspiration for what i want to listen when at home. So i save sometimes save to a playlist and when i'm at home i can play that list with almost one push of a button.
Another point is, i read a lot from you here how Tidal changed this, changed that, giving you headaches on how to keep the download function working, etc. But still you keep up, proving how important this is to you, or indirectly how important it is for other users of XXhighend.

But there it goes wrong. At least to begin with.

XXHighEnd is that because of its ultra low footprint for the Sound Engine (you can hardly detect CPU cycles when it plays - even during upsampling to 705.6/768.

There is a reason that I don't allow streaming - this is because it won't sound good at all; you can read about that everywhere, although nobody guesses that this is abou that footprint again.

I understand what you are saying, but are you sure the UPnP way really is streaming in the way you mean? I know for fact the music file is brought into the PC memory when it plays, because after a few seconds of commencing a song, you can even disconnect the Control Point and the music plays on just fine. When i go into the PC by Remote Desktop, i can even replay that same last song in the JRiver player, so it must still be in the PC's memory. From what i can tell with my limited knowledge about this, is the file location from where the music file is brought in, is only a proxy running on the control point, so Tidal still thinks your playing on the control point, when in fact you grab that file over the network and bring it into the PC's memory

When i select a Tidal song in my Control Point app and press play, the renderer (PC) almost instantly plays it, with only half or 1 second of delay, so i think the file is still being downloaded while playing already commenced, and that is obviously what we don't want.

Now what if the UPnP architecture allows for the Renderer to wait with playing until the full file is downloaded (which is probably only seconds anyway), and what if the remaining required networking would not be that different from the current RDC way.... or possibly even better...?
You can even kill networking entirely, because once the song is started, the Renderer will play it completely also when the connection with de Control Point is lost.
I'm almost sure this UPnP architecture allows for commands to be sent from the Rendere to the Control point at the end of the song (at least it already does now), to let the Control Point send the commands for the next song in the playlist. This wil obviously also disable pause/stop and volume functions, so a middle way should be most practical. Maybe it is even possible to let the user select between these options..?

So all in all, if this is all possible, would this not be the perfect solution to use Tidal with XXHighend? And because the XXHighend side in this case has nothing to do with Tidal directly anymore (because that is the control points deal), would that not save you from a lot of continiously reoccuring work too?

Ever thought of how a USB cable (I don't know whether your have a configurable Lush^2 or ^3) so (more than) vastly can influence SQ ? officially it can't. But everything, really everything matters.

I have a Lush^2. Although i have some other fish to fry first (i'm working on room acoustics right now) and i think my PC is not optimal, i use a Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L (v1) 1.8GHz Octa Core on some chinese motherboard, have set up XXHighend to play from ram, but no ramdisk.  I may have to upgrade or try another PC. But to be honest i think i will not look into that until next fall.

But I sincerely thank you for the contribution !

Happy to share my ideas! BTW I deliberatly posted this here so others could read along.

Erwin

[Erwin]

To verify all this, i did some basic obervations in the windows resource monitor.

When i disable UPnP in JRiver (the Renderer in my setup) Networking is Zero, all networking dissapears from the monitor. Only now and then it pops up, with very little activity, but obviously that is for other stuff besides the UPnP part.

When i start the UPnP Renderer service (actually it is DLNA) some ports are opened and activity is as follows (orange line in the graphs is JRiver, mediacenter32.exe, and ofcourse a Remote Desktop session runs to be able to see this)

When i play a 24/192 song via Tidal in the controller app, the file is thrown over to the renderers memory with about 128Mbps, so it takes a couple of seconds to load the entire song in the Renderer, and networking again drops very low. Playing starts already while the file is still 'downloaded'. You can see some communication is still going on while playing, this is explained in the links i provided earlier.

and this is what that looks like in the Control Point app running on my Android phone (app is BubbleUPnP), i made some screenshots showing the Tidal menu, basicly all the Tidal funcionality is there, like showing the album for the current song, playing track radio, saving to playlists, etc. In the top right you can select what device to play to, You can play locally in this app, as in on the device itself, or to a UPnP renderer, or a Chromecast, even some smart TV's are supported i believe. Volume, etc, it all works, pressing the phone volume buttons send commands (via the UPnP protocol) to the renderer to change volume accordingly. How convenient...

But, as a stated in my previous post, you can kill the control point app, and playing resumes for the one song that is started. Here i pressed Play in the control point app and immediatly after i closed the control point app. Playing resumes but you can see there is no networking anymore

So would you still call all this 'Streaming?'

i have absolutely no idea what freedom there is in the UPnP AV (or DLNA) protocol about what networking to use and what not etc, but i would like to find out

[PeterSt]

Erwin !

You are one of those who deserves a prize for your efforts alone.
Maybe it even deserves me working it out (after all). In any event you're a man to my heart with those (Taskmanager etc.) details.

All right - I only read this minutes ago and I must digest it (and read it again a couple of times).
It feels a bit like Android doing the trick here, because that allows formally for playing offline. ... I don't even know how formal this all really is, and to what degree it is actually known that it can work like this. What do you think ? is this known indeed, or did you just found out yourself ?

What's comes across as odd to me, is the (not-) streaming part, which would go unnoticed. Thus, who would know or see the difference, unless you pull the cable ? But careful, because you pull the cable of the control point (which would be Android in your case) and you did not put the Ethernet cable. I think you showed sufficiently you could do that as well, but you did not do that and also did not contemplate that (IIRC after reading all one time). Or did you ?

On a side note, in the last version of XXHighEnd - which contained the special download for Tidal personnel so they could check the working (which never happened and instead I was kicked out), exactly that happens; when playing Attendedly, you (Erwin) would be able to show exactly the same, with no hiccups between tracks. As if it was streaming, but it still was not. Thus exactly your story, hence I surely understand and how it could work. Btw, similar to what Audirvana does from its start - telling that it plays from memory while it takes a minute to do so, in parallel to playing itself. Read : that *thus* does not work (out) at all and sounds poor. Only XXHighEnd really plays from memory (say a full album) without any further intervention.

... But I would be able to let it work, at least when not gapless is allowed. You'll understand. Or other trickery I can't oversee yet.

So I will need to dive into this - and like to. The when is more problematic these days, but we'll see. If you have to spout more meanwhile, don't hesitate. 

Peter

[Erwin]

Haha thanks for the effort prize :-)

Please do take your time digesting this. I'm definitely not asking for you to rush in to this stuff right away or anything.

Instead all i'm asking is if you knew something about the workings of this upnp/dlna stuff and if it can be a thing for XXhighend... because this protocol already exists from what? More than 10 or even 15 years, could be a possibility you already considered this.

I used the xxhighend tidal download functionality way before i found out the way we are discussing here, but from the moment i started with that, i was wondering if it would also be a possibility with xxhighend instead of JRiver. Turns out that may be even so considering the networking activity.

I have no idea what it is exactly that lets JRiver handle tidal's files this way, besides tidal probably not even knowing that is going on at all, since the flac files are proxy'd on the control point's IP. Not even sure i'm saying it right but you probably know what i mean ;-) i bet you will know soon enough once you decide to look into it.

But like i said, would definitevely not rush in to this, and only continue with this when you can see a great demand for it for lots of users, and SQ is NOT comprimised. I can also think of some downsides. Like for instance what if Tidal's (or also Qobuz in BubbleUPnP's case) policy will also prevent using its music this way? Relying on a third party app for control maybe is not optimal, so i would really think about longetivity of these control apps etc. And completely bypassing xxhighends UI when playing like this is also something you can love or hate to do of course

Good idea about trieing to pull ethernet all together, will try that when i'm home again next week.