Help Me Setup a Media Player (Intel NUC) - Questions

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Steelydave, I suspect the DSF conversion in Kodi maybe fixed at 16/48 but interested to follow what you find.

I’ve been thinking of adding a batch conversion of SACD ISOs to DSF and/or FLAC in Music Media Helper to ear the pain of converting many ISOs. I’ll need to do a bit more investigation but it’s probaly feasible.
 
So I added my PCM music library and Kodi imported it fine. There are some minor niggles about the way it handles tags that I don't love - predominantly the way it handles 'Artist' and 'Album Artist' tags. In every other software I've used, the 'Album Artist' tag basically supersedes the 'Artist' tag, so I would use it to group albums by an artist where they have several name iterations. For example, Buddy Rich is credited under loads of different names, like Buddy Rich, The Buddy Rich Big Band, Buddy Rich and his Orchestra, etc etc. The way I tagged my library is that I put the exact correct name in the 'Artist' tag, but then for ALL my buddy rich albums, I put the 'Album Artist' as just 'Buddy Rich'. So in my old playback software only 'Buddy Rich' would show up as an artist. In Kodi, if you list your music by artist, it shows artists listed under BOTH the 'Artist' and 'Album Artist' tag. So my Buddy Rich music for example is listed twice - under 'Buddy Rich' but also all of those other subtle variations. I'll have to look in to it more, I'd rather make Kodi do what I want it to do before I go back and trawl through tens of thousands of tracks I've tagged and start changing things.

I think Garry alluded to this, but in Kodi go to:
System: Settings: Music: Library, there is the choice of "Include artists who appear only on compilations".

By NOT checking this box, I think you'll get the desired result. For example, for "Band on the Run", the album artist is Paul McCartney, and the artist is Paul McCartney & Wings. So "Paul McCartney & Wings" does NOT show up in my list of artists when the above referenced setting is unchecked. All my McCartney albums, regardless of the name he was using, are under "Paul McCartney".

For compilations, the album artist is "Various Artists" and I never see most of the names of the individual track artists in my list. However, the Kodi Music Remote app on my iPad allows me to change this setting on the fly, so all of a sudden I can see that I actually have several songs by Donna Summer even though I don't have any of her albums.

I think this setting will get the result you want.
 
PCM playback seems fine, regardless of file type or number of channels, everything seems to play back correctly. My only issue currently is that my amp is reporting that anything above 24/48 is being played back at 24/48 - so anythin 24/96, 24/192, DSD etc. Will have to look more in to the settings and see if that's correct or not, but it sounds good at least and I'm sure the problem is solvable, if it is a problem to start with.

Steely -

You may have already checked this, but just in case you didn't or in case someone new to PC playback is reading, check your soundcard settings:

Capture.JPG
 
Beyond that, hopefully I can figure out my 24/48 issue, and my multichannel DSD static problem. I also have to figure out how many SACD ISOs I want to convert to .dsf tracks, because the storage requirements are ridiculous.

I'm not sure if this is a sensitive thing to post here or not...but just as a side note, the Oppo BDP-103 with modded firmware will play all types of ISO's (including SACD) over SMB network.
 
These smart phone and tablet remote apps are awesome. The ease of browsing your library and adding songs to the playlist (queue) without interrupting track playback is wonderful. It’s an absolute game changer for music playback. Instant access to any of thousands of tracks!

Album art on most skins comes from a file in the tracks album folder named: folder.jpg

Kodi groups ‘album tracks’ by the album artist and album name. So this gives you the option to have an album artist of ’Various Artists’ called ‘70s Quad Hits’ with each track’s artist tag as the actual artist: e.g ‘Pink Floyd’ or ‘Chicago’ etc

In Kodi you can search and display by ’artist’ even if the song is in a compilation album of ‘various artists’.

That’s the theory behind its implementation.
I think Garry alluded to this, but in Kodi go to:
System: Settings: Music: Library, there is the choice of "Include artists who appear only on compilations".

By NOT checking this box, I think you'll get the desired result. For example, for "Band on the Run", the album artist is Paul McCartney, and the artist is Paul McCartney & Wings. So "Paul McCartney & Wings" does NOT show up in my list of artists when the above referenced setting is unchecked. All my McCartney albums, regardless of the name he was using, are under "Paul McCartney".

For compilations, the album artist is "Various Artists" and I never see most of the names of the individual track artists in my list. However, the Kodi Music Remote app on my iPad allows me to change this setting on the fly, so all of a sudden I can see that I actually have several songs by Donna Summer even though I don't have any of her albums.

I think this setting will get the result you want.

Thank you so much, this is the setting that fixed exactly what I was grumbling about. My number of album artists went from 1,700(ish) down to 800(ish) after I flipped the switch, just to show you how much redundancy it eliminated!


You may have already checked this, but just in case you didn't or in case someone new to PC playback is reading, check your soundcard settings:

Actually I'm running Linux (as detailed at the beginning of this thread) and when you go in to the Sound properties thing it doesn't show or allow you to set sampling rate. Presumably it's just 'flexible' and set by whatever application has control of the audio device at the time. Kodi on Linux uses a driver called PulseAudio for audio and video output, and I'm not sure if it's set this way by default, or if I triggered it by messing with the fixed/optimised/best match audio output thing, but anyway in the System Settings -> Audio Output section, one of the options is 'Limit Sampling Rate (kHz)' and for whatever reason it was set to 48.0 by default. I bumped it up to 192.0 and my problem seems to be gone.


Steelydave, I suspect the DSF conversion in Kodi maybe fixed at 16/48 but interested to follow what you find.

I’ve been thinking of adding a batch conversion of SACD ISOs to DSF and/or FLAC in Music Media Helper to ear the pain of converting many ISOs. I’ll need to do a bit more investigation but it’s probaly feasible.

I didn't get much time to play with it today, but I think it may be outputting DSD at 24/48 - one thing I did notice is that when I bumped up the sample rate limit (as outlined above) to 192kHz that it seemed to eliminate that static at the start of multichannel DSD tracks that I was complaining about yesterday. I'll do some more testing with some other discs and update on this later.

I'd prefer to keep my DSD tracks as DSD, in the optimistic hopes that someday I'll be able to afford a DSD-capable external DAC. Even 24/48 transcoded-on-the-fly by Kodi PCM will do for now, I'd rather that than spend months converting all my SACD ISOs to FLAC only to have a cheap DSD DAC come along. I never understood why OPPO didn't just take the D/A guts from the 103 or 105 (or 203/205), add a USB input and sell it as a multichannel DSD/PCM DAC for $350 or something. They'd have the market cornered, as all the other multichannel DACs seem to start at about 3x-4x that price.


I'm not sure if this is a sensitive thing to post here or not...but just as a side note, the Oppo BDP-103 with modded firmware will play all types of ISO's (including SACD) over SMB network.

I don't think it's off-limits as talking about ripping and converting is fine too as long as links to pirated/bootleg stuff isn't shared. I have considered this avenue as I have a 103, but I've held off so far for a few reasons - the main one is that my 103 is a bit tempramental, I got it from a scratch and dent sale for $200 because it had some big heavy object dropped on it, and sometimes it doesn't want to turn on. Which brings me to my second point, I don't know if I want to send money to someone in China for the modded firmware in the first place, especially with the added risk that my 103 may just stop working of its own accord one of these days. The other reason I haven't gone with the 103 as my output device is that as far as I know there's no gapless playback via DLNA, and also going that root of DLNA host/renderer just makes things a bit more sluggish, the buffering across the network etc and I'm really enjoying how fast everything is with my NUC at the moment. Like I said above, if OPPO did a cheap 5.1 or 7.1 DAC based on the guts of their disc players with a USB input, I'd be the first one on board to buy one.


So my problem today has to do with artist and album metadata/thumbnail/artwork scraping using Kodi's built-in Universal Scraper. I did the scraping process as outlined (which is easy, to scrape artist info, go in to music ->artists and right click on any artist and pick 'Query info for all artists' - album scraping is the same, just go in to albums, right click and repeat the same process) and it worked well for some of my stuff, but not all of it.

My music library is divided in to a few main FLAC folders:

CD_Rips (16/44.1 FLAC)
DVDA_Rips (everything PCM higher than CD sampling rate, both stereo and multichannel)
Needledrops (a small amount of stuff ripped from vinyl in various sample rates)

Now my tagging process is that the stuff in CD_Rips is tagged "normally", so lets say we're dealing with Donald Fagen's 'Kamakiriad' album. I have the CD rip of it in flac, and I also have the hi-res stereo and 5.1 in the DVDA_rips folder. The version in CD_Rips just has the album title 'Kamakiriad', but to differentiate the versions in the DVDA_Rips folder, I tagged the album titles as 'Kamakiriad (96/24 Stereo)' and 'Kamakiriad (96/24 5.1 Surround)'.

The problem I run in to is the scraper only understands album if they have the exact album title - so it knows what 'Kamakiriad' is, but 'Kamakiriad (96/24 Stereo)' or 'Kamakiriad (96/24 5.1 Surround)' are unknown albums to it. So for albums it's fine with all my CD Rips, but all my hi-res stuff it has no idea about because I've put info in brackets after the album title. It also affects artist scraping for artists where I have no CD Rips, like Beck for example - I only have his surround sound releases, and the scraper doesn't know what any of them are, because the albums are tagged like 'Guero (48/24 Stereo)', 'Guero (48/24 5.1 Surround)' etc. So for those artists the scraper doesn't populate their entry with thumbnails and biographies etc.

In all the playback software I've used from foobar to jriver (and kodi is no different), appending something in brackets showing the sample rate/channel config to the album title was the only way to make each different version of the album show up as it's own album, even if the software had the facility to display the number of channels or sample rate in the library browser or playback screen.

If I tagged all the different versions of 'Kamakiriad' as just the album title (with no notation of them being hi-res stereo, or 5.1 or whatever) if I went in to the album in Kodi it would just show as one album, with 3 versions of each track number. In short it would be a mess, and I'm happy with the way I've done all my tagging. Not only that, I have something in the neighbourhood of 15,000 high-res tracks of various types, all tagged in that (samplerate/bitdepth number-of-channels) style, everything from (48/24 Mono) to (96/24 Quadraphonic) to (192/24 5.1 Surround) etc. and I don't want to have to change any or all of them.

So the (long-winded) question is, is there any way to get Kodi's Universal Album Scraper and Universal Artist Scraper to ignore the bracketed text at the end of the album title, or do I have to get on the Kodi forum and beg the developer to add it as a feature? It seems like it would be useful beyond my specific needs, ie people tagging CDs with stuff like '(Deluxe Edition)' etc. that would throw off the scraper. I'd even be willing to just put up with a sort of manual solution akin to when you look up tag info in a program like mp3tag, like if I could look up 'Beck' myself and then apply his artist entry to my Beck folder in Kodi, but I can't seem to find any way to do that at the moment. It seems like an all-or-nothing proposition because it's so automated, either your tags are perfect and the scraper works, or your tags are non-standard (like mine) and it doesn't.

I know that one solution is putting the artist.jpg file in the root folder for each artist, but using the scraper gives you way more info - in addition to the artist thumbnail you get a background image, biography and a bunch of genre tags and other metadata info (genre, years active, etc.) that makes things even more useful. I'd really like to have all that stuff for the artists that are missing it in my library now.
 
So my problem today has to do with artist and album metadata/thumbnail/artwork scraping using Kodi's built-in Universal Scraper. I did the scraping process as outlined (which is easy, to scrape artist info, go in to music ->artists and right click on any artist and pick 'Query info for all artists' - album scraping is the same, just go in to albums, right click and repeat the same process) and it worked well for some of my stuff, but not all of it.

Frankly I'd be surprised if there is any way around any of this, and I think it's just something we have to live with. I do it just like you do, and in the end it's more important to me to differentiate between the different versions than to have the scraper find info for me.
 
steelydave;359368Kodi on Linux uses a driver called [URL="http://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio" said:
PulseAudio[/URL] for audio and video output, and I'm not sure if it's set this way by default, or if I triggered it by messing with the fixed/optimised/best match audio output thing, but anyway in the System Settings -> Audio Output section, one of the options is 'Limit Sampling Rate (kHz)' and for whatever reason it was set to 48.0 by default. I bumped it up to 192.0 and my problem seems to be gone.

From what I've read, Pulse Audio is required on 'full' installs of Linux to allow for Linux system sounds and Kodi audio to exist together. So I guess it's not used on LibreElec. But Pulse seems to be a problem in that it won't allow pass through of DTS-HD (for movie watching). Looks like you can run in Multi Channel Mode but audio isn't bit accurate. You can disable pulse though (but then you may not get system sounds?)
 
Hey Steelydave I just learned that NUC7's can't do audio passthrough of DTS-MA HD or TrueHD (I think Atmos as well?) when using Linux. There's a very long Intel thread here. I'm curious if you've experienced this problem on Kodi? I've only tested DTS-MA HD and cannot get audio passthrough to work. See my thread for a bit more info if you like.
 
Having a panic attack.
I have this My Nuc.
It stopped working completely and no idea why. I accessed via a monitor, keyboard, mouse. I get all this computer internal stuff, BOOT, RAID, Configure, Searching for, etc and basically asking me in RAID, do I want to wipe clean and start over, Y or N. I am too afraid to press Y. I have no experience with the internal workings of a computer.
I ordered a new one, New One arriving today, a couple hundred dollars cheaper, from what I have read, it is not necessary to have the amount of stuff I had before.
I am hoping to have easy set up, load my existing JRiver with my key, and back in action, it's never that simple, but I don't know what else to do.
Any speculation, why it happened, or am I over reacting to a simple, reboot internally. Pressing the on/off, pulling the power, none of that works. When it was working before many times I could hear it spinning up which is louder than idle, now it just is dead, a tiny hum, but that's it.
 
Hi marpow.

Not sure what’s happened with your NUC. It sounds like your internal 2TB hard disk is not being recognised or Windows is corrupted. You may be able to do a ‘repair’ on Windows and recover the Windows image. I suspect your disk’s data will be ok.

Is there a PC store locally you can take it to?

You are right about your original NUC being having over the top specs. However I would have recommended an i3 NUC without Optane memory. But the one you have purchased should be ok.
 
Having a panic attack.
I have this My Nuc.
It stopped working completely and no idea why. I accessed via a monitor, keyboard, mouse. I get all this computer internal stuff, BOOT, RAID, Configure, Searching for, etc and basically asking me in RAID, do I want to wipe clean and start over, Y or N. I am too afraid to press Y. I have no experience with the internal workings of a computer.
I ordered a new one, New One arriving today, a couple hundred dollars cheaper, from what I have read, it is not necessary to have the amount of stuff I had before.
I am hoping to have easy set up, load my existing JRiver with my key, and back in action, it's never that simple, but I don't know what else to do.
Any speculation, why it happened, or am I over reacting to a simple, reboot internally. Pressing the on/off, pulling the power, none of that works. When it was working before many times I could hear it spinning up which is louder than idle, now it just is dead, a tiny hum, but that's it.

Just to be clear... you think the NUC is dead right? Windows will not boot up? No apps are available? No internet connection?

You can check if its the HDD by booting to a USB drive and seeing if you have any functionality.

Is there a reason you opted for an internal HHD instead of an SSD?
 
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Just to be clear... you think the NUC is dead right? Windows will not boot up? No apps are available? No internet connection?

You can check if its the HDD by booting to a USB drive and seeing if you have any functionality.
Tore
Is there a reason you opted for an internal HHD instead of an SSD?

No reason except lack of knowledge, not sure what those are?
I think Homer’s idea of taking to PC store is good. I was very confident that when I got inside I could fix it, but everything is gone. Very weird because the night before I accessed JRiver from the app and worked perfectly.
When I use the NUC I only use for two things, play JRiver, tag, playlist, etc, just basic things within JRiver. The other thing I use is Google Chrome just to get artwork for files when I don’t like what JRiver picks automatically.
I access the NUC from my PC laptop via the program called Splashtop. Pretty simple.
The JRiver app acess’s the NUC for playback only.
I believe that the NUC that arrives today that is just used basically for the one function should be ok?
 
the difference between a HHD (hard disk drive) and an SSD (solid state drive) is the former uses spinning magnetic disks and mechanical pickups. the latter does not have any moving parts. its like a big memory module. For the operating system and the programs, SSDs offer greater access speed. Its not so good for large storage though... like in your NAS.

the 2nd NUC you ordered will work fine I believe.

A tech store will certainly be able to help you out.

You never did answer the question though... if you plug a keyboard and monitor into your NUC does it work like a PC or not.
 
the difference between a HHD (hard disk drive) and an SSD (solid state drive) is the former uses spinning magnetic disks and mechanical pickups. the latter does not have any moving parts. its like a big memory module. For the operating system and the programs, SSDs offer greater access speed. Its not so good for large storage though... like in your NAS.

the 2nd NUC you ordered will work fine I believe.

A tech store will certainly be able to help you out.

You never did answer the question though... if you plug a keyboard and monitor into your NUC does it work like a PC or not.
Yes, I set up keyboard, mouse, and screen and I got no Windows, no ability to reboot, etc.
New one has arrived, set up NUC is easy, now just trying to get JRiver going and trying to get it to find the NAS on network.
 
Cost me money, but I am back in action.
1. NUC set up and running.
2. JRiver set up on new NUC.
3 Set up network for access.
4. JRiver loaded all files (music) from NAS.
5. Set up Splashtop for remote access. (my PC to NUC access).
Tomorrow set up players for listening on my rig.
Rebuild a fair amount of album cover thumbnails as the JRiver got about 90% but missed a few.
I almost can't believe I was so successful. I am still a beginner, I believe part of my success is I take pictures of my screen when I have done something successful so when I get lost in the PC I just look at pictures I have taken and it works out.
Back tomorrow, the Ayreon, The Source 5.1 arrived plus a few others while I was down but still able to listen to the hard discs.
 
Yikes, scary. So, do you know what happened to your other system?

Very frustrating, for sure, and it is going to take awhile to get it back to where it was. I don't think I lost any music files and I'm certainly not going to check every album.
#1 goal for today is finish missing cover art and then playing.
 
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It shouldn't have affected anything on the NAS, so your music files will be intact. The cover art should be embedded in the tags and that should all still be available too. Artist photos/info could be an issue I suppose, Im not sure how JRiver stores that.

Marpow, I assume you use your laptop to control JRiver because there is no other screen available in the system? Yes?

During my short audition with JRiver, I thought they already had a way to do that where you loaded a copy of JRiver on a laptrop but set it to access a remote library.
 
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