Displaying Composer information in a Control Point

[DavidHB]

(24-11-2013 14:44)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  I think we are still in stone age with most music servers and all control apps. Minim Server is far ahead, may be we're in middle ages with it. Perhaps in a few years we will be there where we are right now in other aspects of computer life.

Considering that the First Linn DS (which I think is generally regarded as the first commercially available high end network music player) was only launched six years or so ago, the pace of development has been remarkably rapid. I'd guess that, if anything, it will become even more rapid during the next few years.

Network audio is still far from being a mainstream product, and the big money (and therefore the resource focus of development effort) will be in making it mainstream. A reasonable guess will be that manufacturers who make these products (notably the electronics giants like Sony, Samsung and Panasonic) will want to use DNLA as the technical core of their mainstream network audio offer.

This is bad news for classical music enthusiasts, as DNLA servers are designed to have a much more restricted capability than their UPnP counterparts, such as MinimServer. The justification for impoverishing the feature set is usually given as interoperability, but I suspect that manufacturers are really concerned that most users simply will not buy anything that seems technically complex, and that they also dislike on principle anything that is open source and therefore not under the control of their cartel.

Judging by tests with my Samsung network attached TV, the problem with DNLA renderers is not that they cannot receive and interpret correctly the browsing tree provided by MinimServer. The real problem is that they are designed to work only with mainstream (i.e. lossy) audio formats; FLAC, for example, is not supported. Distinctions of this kind will tend to drive a wedge between mainstream and niche products, and classical enthusiasts could continue to find themselves saddled with the requirement to use the latter.

David