Music won't play on Roberts radio

[Hungryhalibut]

I've recently installed Minim on my Synology and it all works fine on my Naim SuperUniti. We also have a Roberts Internet radio in the kitchen, which sees all the albums, genres etc., but when I navigate to an album and press play it says <EMPTY>. An old thread on here mentions special characters and date formats, and that future updates would deal with format issues. The Roberts works fine with the Synology server, so it's not a networking issue.

I hope there's an easy fix. Thanks.

[simoncn]

(22-03-2015 10:06)Hungryhalibut Wrote:  I've recently installed Minim on my Synology and it all works fine on my Naim SuperUniti. We also have a Roberts Internet radio in the kitchen, which sees all the albums, genres etc., but when I navigate to an album and press play it says <EMPTY>. An old thread on here mentions special characters and date formats, and that future updates would deal with format issues. The Roberts works fine with the Synology server, so it's not a networking issue.

I hope there's an easy fix. Thanks.

Are you able to open the album and select an individual track?

Have you checked the MinimServer log for error messages?

[Hungryhalibut]

(22-03-2015 15:44)simoncn Wrote:  

(22-03-2015 10:06)Hungryhalibut Wrote:  I've recently installed Minim on my Synology and it all works fine on my Naim SuperUniti. We also have a Roberts Internet radio in the kitchen, which sees all the albums, genres etc., but when I navigate to an album and press play it says <EMPTY>. An old thread on here mentions special characters and date formats, and that future updates would deal with format issues. The Roberts works fine with the Synology server, so it's not a networking issue.

I hope there's an easy fix. Thanks.

Are you able to open the album and select an individual track?

Have you checked the MinimServer log for error messages?

I can see the albums, but as soon as I select one it says empty. I can't get to the tracks. I've attached the log.

[simoncn]

(22-03-2015 19:16)Hungryhalibut Wrote:  I can see the albums, but as soon as I select one it says empty. I can't get to the tracks. I've attached the log.

Please do the following:

1) Set the logging level to Debug
2) Leave the log window open
3) Power the Roberts off and on
4) Attempt to open one album
5) In the log window, select 'Save as' to save a log file
6) Set the logging level back to Info
7) Zip the log file and attach it to a post here, including the name of the album that you tried to open

Many thanks!

[JimR]

Hello Famished Fish,

I may well be the bloke who started the previous thread that you referred to.

I have two Roberts radios: an iStream Revival and an iStream Revival 2. Love 'em both.

The good news is that they both now work perfectly with MinimServer.

The bad news is that it was a bit of a fight to make it so. Simon was of great help in this. If I recall correctly (it was a while ago), the solution was indeed around date formats and/or 'dodgy' characters in file names.

Being a little bit IT savvy, I wrote a Python script which munched through my NAS's file structure and:

a) Removed/replaced any potentially disruptive file name characters. Can't remember the full details without looking at the code, but basically I only left alphanumerics and a few extras such as brackets.

b) I looked inside each file at the date tag. For FLACs my code edited all files so they had a yyyy-mm-dd date. For the handful of mp3s I have, I set a yyyy date.

Not sure I ever fully established whether both of these were necessary, or whether just one would have been sufficient.

Now everything works fine.

If you are sufficiently into computers to install the necessary Python libraries then run Python scripts against your NAS files I will send you the code. (Take a backup first!). If not, I guess it depends on the size of your library whether this is possible to do by hand. Probably not. Maybe mp3tag could be programmed to do it?

Or maybe someone else has a simpler solution?

Jim.

[JimR]

Another thought ...

If I remember correctly, the problems you describe did not occur in the days that I used Twonky as my uPnP server. They only arose when I switched to MinimServer. So what about running Twonky and MinimServer side by side on your NAS? Presumably they can both be pointed to a single set of music files. You could then point your Naim to MimimServer whilst pointing the Roberts radio to Twonky?

Jim (Roberts)

[Hungryhalibut]

Hopefully a zip file will be attached. The album I was trying to play is Catalyst, by Acoustic Triangle.

[Hungryhalibut]

(23-03-2015 14:37)JimR Wrote:  Another thought ...

If I remember correctly, the problems you describe did not occur in the days that I used Twonky as my uPnP server. They only arose when I switched to MinimServer. So what about running Twonky and MinimServer side by side on your NAS? Presumably they can both be pointed to a single set of music files. You could then point your Naim to MimimServer whilst pointing the Roberts radio to Twonky?

Jim (Roberts)

Thanks Jim

I was thinking of loading the Synology server for the Roberts, as I know it works. But it's very hard to navigate to the right album via the Roberts, whereas Minim is really easy (it just doesn't work!!), and I'd much rather use it if at all possible. I mentioned this on the Naim Forum and someone else who uses Minim tried it with his Roberts - and it did not work for him either.

Fingers crossed!!

[simoncn]

(23-03-2015 19:53)Hungryhalibut Wrote:  Hopefully a zip file will be attached. The album I was trying to play is Catalyst, by Acoustic Triangle.

Thanks very much! This shows that the album contents were returned by MinimServer (11 items) but there is something in them that the Roberts doesn't like.

Please can you repeat the same exercise with the logging level set to Trace. This will show me the complete XML information that MinimServer is returning for the album. From this, I will need to try to guess what is causing the Roberts to misbehave.

[Hungryhalibut]

Thanks Simon, I'll do it this evening. What I don't understand is how the Roberts will play happily using the Synology media server, as the files being served will still contain all the same metadata. Surely Minim can't be adding things in? As you can tell, I'm no IT expert!