My Setup Experience

[TonyL]

Just had an exciting morning discovering PlugPlayer and thought it might be helpful for others to share my experience and views to date

I have a QNAP nas on my network with a pretty large and following a few weeks work with id3tagger and media monkey a relatively well organised mp3 and flac collection. I had intended to setup a sagetv based media system but googled thwarted that by buying them and closing them down. I also have an iPad and iPhone and wanted to have a sound system controlled from those devices with two zones at home with Yamaha rx371 av units and Cambridge minx 5.1 speakers. So I was considering sonos which I understand operates pretty much standalone and Logitech Squeezebox. QNAP do a squeezebox application so seemed a good choice, though my relatively underpowered qnap 409 on arm x09 might not be built for it and it's a £300+ investment for the hardware so thought I'd play around with other solutions. Sonos is even more of an investment so only if nothing else works...

Installed twonky and it setup fine pretty quickly so started exploring iPad upnp apps. Main disappointment was navigation. Connecting was fine but apps like mediaconnect and various others like 8player and fusion stream apps seemed to want to be video and music players but seemed to accomplish neither. For me the best navigation I've seen is iTunes cover flow sorted by artist by album. So navigate with album art grouped by major artists like oasis for instance so you don't have to remember album names and you don't get every artist on every compilation album appearing on the list. Ideally also with google speed searching. But i dont want to just remote control itunes as the only pc i leave on all day is the nas. Plugplayer is by far the closest I could find. Figure it might actually be a twonky issue rather than a player issue, but plugplayer had by far the best playing interface with albums to the left and player to the right on the ipad and with album art loading quickly enough to be functional. Plus my folders are just about arranged as artist and album so I can get close to the arrangement I want if I navigate by folder. Plugplayer is leagues ahead of the other guys for me on navigation. However if viewed on a folder basis seems reluctant to let you view the songs themselves by anything other than alphabetical order within a folder which isn't great. Plus I don't seem to be able to use functions like random or repeat. Havent yet played with playlists. Still 80 per cent of the way

Then browsing the forums I chanced upon playing through media renderers. So I setup my iPhone as a renderer. Tough to get it to work as the device URL end is hidden, no scrolling right. Also unlike twonky it didnt seem to auto detect, odd as its all on the same subnet. Fortunately the forums helped and I used the the jar app hosted here and the Upnp scanner here http://alax.info/blog/257 to figure out that the end of the URL is RendererDescription.xml. Took a while but got there in the end. Pretty buggy to get it setup. Twonky on the qnap struggles on the initial library download if it's doing something else so get a lot of the directory error messsages that other users seem to get. My collection is around 20k songs so I guess that's understandable if a bit frustrating

Then I remembered I have an old iPhone...and that there's an iPhone dock cable for the rx371 (I don't have one so am using a phono cable with the 3.5 socket at the moment but £50 on amazon for the dock still a lot cheaper than sonos or squeezebox). Awesome. So I installed plugplayer on the redundant iPhone and hooked it up to my av receiver and now can remote control it from the iPad and from my active iPhone. Which means it does pretty much what sonos and squeezebox would have done. I even have a second old iPhone that technically belongs to the missus and is currently locked that I might be able to negotiate onto the other zone and be able to control both zones from the master iPad and iPhone.

Other than the slight difficulty with navigation that might be twonky's fault. I get 208 error reasonably regularly. Each app crashes every once in a while. currently I'm playing through a long album from the iPhone and logging in occasionally on the iPad or master iPhone to see if it works to change song etc and I'd say one out of every three times the app shuts down without explanation. I have wifi always on in advanced settings for the iPhone on the av receiver but sometimes It just doesn't want to be found. also I have two wifi zones at home and moving between them means creating the connections again from scratch which often seems to much for the software no handle, no idea where the roadblock is

That's all pretty vague, I'm not yet aware of how to get hold of crash logs when I figure it out I'll post

So thanks very much plugplayer guys (and twonky) for an awesome app that has saved me a bundle versus a hardware based solution. very excited about recycling old hardware and being able to put my speakers to better use.

Gonna spend the rest of the day playing and flicking through the forums for solutions to my bugs

[abramsh]

Thanks for taking the time to write this all up. Hopefully you'll but that much time into an app store review

Sounds like you hit at least two known bugs/missing features:
1. There's a good change the 208 errors are due to the fact that you're server can't keep up with all the requests that PlugPlayer makes to get album art. Some servers have no problem, but if the software or hardware is slow, it can get bogged down by all the requests. You can turn off artwork while browsing in the advanced settings to see if that's the cause.
2. "WIFI When Locked" does not currently apply to the built-in renderer, so if it running in the background is not playing music for 10(?) minutes, the OS will kill the app. Try keeping the screen on and the power plugged in to see if that solves the problem.

Hopefully we'll have these fixed in 4.2 (4.1 is awaiting Apple's approval).

If you continue to have a repeatable crash, please email the logs to me with a description of how to reproduce the problem. You can find some (old) info on crash logs here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19

[csimon]

Plus my folders are just about arranged as artist and album so I can get close to the arrangement I want if I navigate by folder.

As long as your server (Twonky) allows it, you can sort any way you like, you don't have to be restricted to folder views. But many servers are inflexible with the sorting options that you can configure, and that's when you'll get problems with compilation albums and things like that. These sort of sorting problems are not the fault of the controller app, it's how the server serves the directory listing. I use J R Media Centre which has amazing sorting options, but unfortunately it's not available for installing on a NAS and can only run on a Windows PC.

Plugplayer is leagues ahead of the other guys for me on navigation. However if viewed on a folder basis seems reluctant to let you view the songs themselves by anything other than alphabetical order within a folder which isn't great.

Plugplayer does resort items that are delivered from the server, if the number of items in a folder exceeds a certain amount, and this has been a source of annoyance for some time as it mangles the way you have asked your server to deliver them. However, in a recent release, you can now configure the number inthe Settings, so if you set it to a ridiculously high number, e.g. 1000, PlugPlayer will never resort the items and will display them in the order returned by the server, e.g. track number order, or however you've configured it.

For me the best navigation I've seen is iTunes cover flow sorted by artist by album

I would still like to see a more graphical approach to browsing in PlugPlayer, with some sort of Coverflow or at least a grid display of album covers instead of a textual list with a tiny thumbnmail.

[TonyL]

Yes I have thrown a solid review to the app store!

I had noticed the wifi on option didn't seem to be working on the renderer. Hope to get that on a later version. As you say the 208 seems largely a roadblock problem somewhere. Crashes are a bit random to date so will postif I notice anything systemic

On the navigation noted this on another forum to customise twonky to the view I was looking for, by artist then by album. It's pretty solid solution
http://forums.linn.co.uk/bb/showthread.php?tid=10532

Coverflow would be a great addition, as would a grid view, maybe sometimg to add to the list

[TonyL]

I now have two iphone 3gs set up as media renderers with the ipod doc yds12 to my AV receivers!

Chuffed with the setup. However as a renderer the iphones do not keep wifi on when they are locked and usually to get them to play i have to unlock them, and usually in fact startup plugplayer again. Crashing in general is sporadic

However, one of them unfortunately does not seem to be able to keep plugplayer open. Running PP 4.0.1, and running ios 4.2.1 which is the default upgrade for the hardware. Opening plugplayer shows the spashscreen, then the playlist then hangs for 5-10 seconds then closes down

Is PP 4.0.1 incompatible with ios 4.2.1? or something else that i should be changing? I have a log file if that helps

[abramsh]

4.0.1 should work with 4.2.1, but I suggestion you upgrade to PP 4.1.0 just to be sure.