Open letter to Simon Re the awesome MinimServer

[wappinghigh]

Dear Simon..

What is it that makes your music server so awesome?

I say this as a genuine question and I'll come about the logic behind it with a little history of me "playing around" over the years with various UPnP and other music DLNA "servers"...

Multi Room audio all began with me with Sonos. Some 6 odd years ago now.

In those days we had pretty much 16 Bit files we gained access to via building an itunes library via putting in our CD collections...

Then the whole 24 Bit and DSD thing came along, so naturally I went search for a way to play those files.. And that's when I discovered MinimServer.. Simon you may recall I was one of the earlier guys right? I wasn't the first, by any means, but I did throw in an early contribution..

Ok back to my quest and "journey". In the early Sonos days, many users with (largish) fixed wire networks like me ran into troubles with Sonos and the Spanning tree protocols, multicast and broadcast network storms... At the time I was running a large Cisco managed switch and realised after months of toil and configuration heartache just replacing that with a couple SG100 unmanaged switches was a heck of a lot easier!

My network remained very stable for over 2-3 years after that.

With both Sonos (and MinimSever for the 24/DSD files) living happily on the network...

Fast forward to today, and I finally bit the bullet to pull out the Sonos system and try Heos (as an alternative) after they recently released firmware that handles DSD. 24bit Apple lossless has been HEOS capable for a while) Apparently Apple AIFF is "coming"...

I am also experimenting with Roon.. which is non DLNA and uses mDNS and what looks like Apple Airplay I believe (it down samples 24 and DSD). And Also taking a look at Spotify Connect streaming to capable players...

Now here is where my quest gets interesting..

Heos looks the go. But MinimServer doesn't work with it properly. (You know the other thread). Heos "recommends" Asset UPnP which I have been trialling for a week... it works with Heos alright.. but I am suspicious it is crashing my network!

Could that be correct? Does it send out way much more network multicast type traffic??

So back to my original question. Is it the simplicity (and network quiteness)...for want of a better word which makes your software so awesome? If that is the case, how do you get around what I would call the the "HEOS problem"? (which clearly needs something like Asset spewing out network traffic all the time?)

Cheers Simon... And rock on MinimServer..!

[simoncn]

Asset does send out more UPnP discovery announcement messages than MinimServer. Ths is because the ohNet UPnP stack that MinimServer uses is designed to send out the minimum amount of traffic needed to operate the UPnP discovery protocol correctly, assuming that other network components are handling these messages correctly.

In contrast, Asset (and many other servers) are designed to "flood" the network with very frequent discovery announcements in an attempt to compensate for possible deficiencies in other network components.

I would like to keep discussion on the HEOS problem on the other thread that you have started for this topic.