Minimserver problems with Roberts IStream radio

[JimR]

I have a Linn streamer in the lounge and have being experimenting with MinimServer instead of Twonky. All going well for several weeks.

Then yesterday I bought a Roberts Revival iStream radio for the kitchen and its operation with Minimserver is problematic. When I select some albums the tracks are listed properly and play properly. When I select other albums all I get is an "Empty" message and no tracks listed. This happens with and without transcoding.

Just switched back to Twonky and the new radio now streams perfectly on all albums.

Any suggestions how to make the iStream work consistently with Minimserver?

Thanks.

[simoncn]

(12-02-2013 19:56)JimR Wrote:  I have a Linn streamer in the lounge and have being experimenting with MinimServer instead of Twonky. All going well for several weeks.

Then yesterday I bought a Roberts Revival iStream radio for the kitchen and its operation with Minimserver is problematic. When I select some albums the tracks are listed properly and play properly. When I select other albums all I get is an "Empty" message and no tracks listed. This happens with and without transcoding.

Just switched back to Twonky and the new radio now streams perfectly on all albums.

Any suggestions how to make the iStream work consistently with Minimserver?

Thanks.

Please run a trace by doing the following:

1) Switch off the iStream
2) Restart MinimServer
3) If MinimServer is running on a NAS, start MinimWatch
4) From the minim icon, select 'Show log'
5) In the log window, change the logging level from Info to Trace
6) Leave the log window open
7) Switch on the iStream and browse to one of the albums that shows an "Empty" message. Don't play any music.
8) You should see some trace messages in the log window
9) In the log window, change the logging level from Trace back to Info
10) In the log window, press 'Save as' to save the log file
11) Close the log window
12) Zip the log file and attach it to a post here

[JimR]

Wow! Where else could you get service like this?

(Let me know if this is not what you need.)

[simoncn]

(13-02-2013 18:52)JimR Wrote:  Wow! Where else could you get service like this?

(Let me know if this is not what you need.)

Thanks! Yes, it is what I need. Based on this, I have some questions:

1) What platform are you using to run MinimServer?

2) When you ran this trace, which album was showing up as empty? Was it "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?"

3) Was the album with empty contents shown on the control point before you stopped the trace?

It looks like the contents of the Morning Glory album were sent to the control point correctly. However, there are a couple of things about this album that might be causing problems for the iStream:

a) The album's folder name apparently contains an inverted question mark (Unicode character 0x00BF) instead of a normal question mark (Unicode character 0x003F). This is legal, but it might cause the control point some problems. Is this inverted question mark in the folder name intentional?

b) The album name contains an apostrophe, which MinimServer is sending as the XML escaped character '''

I think it's more likely that the problem is caused by a) than b). Does this fit with your observations about which albums are showing up as empty? In other words, do all these albums contain unusual characters in their folder names or filenames?

[JimR]

Double wow!

1) Running from a QNAP 219P+.

2) Yes. It was the Oasis album.

3) Not totally sure I understand this question. Guess there is no separate control point in this context. I presume that the radio is both control point and renderer. The album was shown on the display in order for me to select it. After I cancelled the "Empty" message it was still there.

a) Loads of my ripped CD names/track names contain upside down question marks. I ripped them all with dbPoweramp and assumed this was normal. Is it not?

b) All I can say here is that other albums that don't work do not have names containing apostrophes.

Thanks for spending your time looking at this. (By comparison, I e-mailed Roberts (to whom I just paid £156) two days ago and no response yet.)

Jim.

[simoncn]

(13-02-2013 23:08)JimR Wrote:  3) Not totally sure I understand this question. Guess there is no separate control point in this context. I presume that the radio is both control point and renderer. The album was shown on the display in order for me to select it. After I cancelled the "Empty" message it was still there.

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, the control point is within the radio. It's the software that puts things on the display and allows you to select them.

Quote:a) Loads of my ripped CD names/track names contain upside down question marks. I ripped them all with dbPoweramp and assumed this was normal. Is it not?

This is definitely not normal. It might have been caused by a charset encoding incompatibility when the file was copied from one machine to another. The upside down question mark was probably substituted for a character that couldn't be represented in the target charset.

Quote:b) All I can say here is that other albums that don't work do not have names containing apostrophes.

Assuming that these other albums do have upside down question marks, I'm confident that this is the reason for the problem.

You're not the first person to report a problem like this. Unfortunately, there are a few control points that don't handle "unusual" characters correctly. The current release of MinimServer doesn't work with these buggy control points.

In a perfect world, the control point vendor (Roberts) would acknowledge the bug and provide a fix. In practice, this is quite unlikely to happen. For this reason, I'm looking into providing a workaround in MinimServer that would allow these characters to be encoded in a way that is acceptable to the iStream and other buggy control points.

Quote:Thanks for spending your time looking at this. (By comparison, I e-mailed Roberts (to whom I just paid £156) two days ago and no response yet.)

You're very welcome.

[JimR]

Most of my CDs were ripped to a Windows device before being moved across to the QNAP. And ? is an illegal character in Windows filenames. It's a wildcard.

So, I presume, if dbPoweramp comes up against an album or track name that contains ?, it substitutes the weird upside down question mark character into the folder/filename instead.

Will try manually removing this character and see if it makes any difference.

[JimR]

Just found this

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/archive/inde...22351.html

Why didn't I find it two years ago?

[simoncn]

(14-02-2013 19:35)JimR Wrote:  Just found this

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/archive/inde...22351.html

Why didn't I find it two years ago?

After some further investigation, this problem turned out not to be caused by unusual characters in filenames, but by an invalid format in the dates that MinimServer was sending to the control point.

The UPnP specification requires dates to be sent as 'YYYY-MM-DD'. Some album dates were tagged as 'YYYY MM DD', and the Roberts control point couldn't handle receiving a date in this format.

The next release of MinimServer will parse dates in tags to ensure they are in the correct format. Any invalid dates will be either reformatted or discarded before being sent to the control point.