Difficulty streaming to Logitech devices

[jjuergensen]

I'm a new user of Vinyl Studio, and have scanned the forum but not seen this topic come up before.  

Short version:  I'm having success making digital copies of albums, and although they play just fine on my apple products, they fail to stream (and play) to my logitech devices (a new Squeezebox Boom, and and old Slim Devices Squeezebox classic).

Long version: I have the software installed on my macbook pro, which connects via usb to a NAD PP3i.  I'm recording to AIFF format on the laptop.  Once I've got the tracks defined and clicks removed, I export to the local instance of iTunes, preferably in apple lossless format.  I have another Mac in the house, a mac mini, that is the central music server.  Both machines are on the network, and it is a simple matter to then import the ALAC files into iTunes on the mac mini.  Almost everything works perfectly then.  I can play the music on the mac mini version of iTunes, or on any version of iTunes running on any computer in the house.  The music successfully streams and plays to an airport express connected to a stereo system.  iTunes even successfully downconverts to AAC 128-bit format when I connect my ipod, and then plays on the iPod.  The one thing it doesn't do, however, is it does NOT stream to either of the Squeezeboxes listed above.  Both squeezeboxes see the albums, and I can tee them up, but when I try to play them nothing happens; the device will show the song as playing, but the progress indicator remains unmoving at the beginning of the song.  All other content, whether burned from CD or downloaded from the apple store, even audio books, plays just fine on these devices; it is only the vinyl studio output that freeezes.  This happens if I use either ALAC or AAC formats as final output.  I'm mystified.  Over time, this will get to be a major pain as I have hundreds of albums I want to convert.

Any thoughts on this?

Many thanks.

-jj

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

Without a device to work with it's hard to say what is happening here.  As a Logitech customer you could perhaps send them a short track saved in VinylStudio and ask them why their device won't play it.  Also, if you'd like to send us something that *does* play, we will see if we can spot any differences between that and the files VinylStudio produces.  An AAC file would be best as these are smaller, and you can email it to:

p DOT sanders AT alpinesoft DOT do DOT uk

If it's too large to email, let me know and we'll arrange an FTP transfer.  Thanks.

Can I just confirm that your version of VinylStudio is up to date?  You should have version 7.5.7 (as displayed in the About box).  We did have a problem of this nature a few releases back but it is fixed now.

[pivdstee]

What sample rate and bit depth are you using?

SB AIFF support is limited to 24/48 if I'm not mistaken...

Pieter

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

If that's the case, you could try saving a track with a lower samplerate and / or bit depth.  Options are available at the point where you save your tracks.

[jjuergensen]

Sorry for the delay responding; in running some more tests I found instances in which the streaming worked fine.  Oddly, the issue seems to be with the tags, not the actual encoding.  When I first import a Vinyl Studio recorded track into iTunes, it will not stream to the squeezebox (as described in the original post).  However, if I then do something to force iTunes to rewrite the tags associated with the track (i.e., rename the song, album, artist, etc.), then it streams just fine.

In terms of my problem, then, I have a pretty trivial workaround.  Just select the album, add a character to the end of the album title, save it, and then reverse it.  It took longer to type that sentence than to do the actual workaround, so I wouldn't ask you to do any work trying to fix it.

Paul, I'll still send you the sample files, in case you're curious, but no action needed.

Thanks for the help!

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

OK, thanks very much for the update.  I took a look at the sample files you sent and they are virtually identical, so whatever is tripping the Squeezebox up must be pretty subtle.

I will take this up with Logitech.  I might want to bounce some sample files off you if that's OK, to see if they stream OK (or not).

[pivdstee]

Tags within AIFF seem to be quite on the professional level, except for an ID3 chunk in the RIFF tags. iTunes can handle those. Maybe the ID3 chunk is missing or non-standard, so SB cannot read those? Re-writing the tag seems to do the trick!

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Update: Fixed in VinylStudio V7.5.8, released 04Jan11