The "Official" Aurender Discussion Thread

[SirAtilla]

Okay, I'm going to take a leap here. I'm assuming that most Aurender users are, at some level, Apple users. Why in tarnation can't we subscribe to the Apple Music app through Aurender. It's time already!

 

I'm sure that there are those who will vehemently disagree, that's okay nobody will make you subscribe, but Apple Music streams content that, from a quality point of view, is on a par with the other streaming services.

 

Pat,

 

I believe there is only one authorized 3rd party app with such integration with Apple Music and that is Sonos. It is not an open API to my knowledge.

 

That being said you might consider just using the Apple Music app on your iPad and use AirPlay to send the music to your Aurender since it is an AirPlay endpoint. While it won't provide a single app it will allow you to use your subscription with the Aurender.

 

One other clarification from your post is the assertion that the streaming quality is equivalent of other services. Currently Apple Music doesn't offer streaming of lossless CD quality audio while TIDAL and QoBuz do. It is probably one of the main reasons these services are integrated into many reference class digital transports and players.

 

Certainly it would appear Apple Music is on par with other lossy streaming services such as Spotify or Pandora.

 

Cheers,

 

Carlin Smith

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Computer Audiophile

[SirAtilla]

The A10 review is up!

 

Computer Audiophile - Aurender A10 Review

 

Curious as to the version of Conductor you were using as one of the features described has not made it into the current GA version yet.

[SirAtilla]

2.8 (1488)

 

Thanks Chris.

 

Believe that is going to be released shortly along with the official MQA support you mention.

[SirAtilla]

No you aren't. I've also run into it with Tidal albums when "added to my library". What's worse is some of the "2nd album" artwork does not show, just the gold record jpg.

 

Though my HD files are still being displayed and playing properly for now, when I scan, it shows that I have 900+ unrecognized files. Obviously not as much as many of you, but that's what I have for now and I'm not about to edit over 900 files.

I emailed Aurender about this last week and they said they weren't sure why it was happening and it could be just the system database updating.

 

Can you tell me if your master database happens to be on a Mac and if you used Finder to copy the files? I had about twenty thousand unrecognized files after the upgrade and was able to remove them all with a single command. In my case the files were always on the Aurender however the updated scanner now notices them and they are not music files. I can explain in much more detail if you fit the scenario.

 

Also can you reply with one of the unrecognized file names likely will begin with ._

 

 

Carlin "Rick" Smith

[SirAtilla]

Yes, from a Mac. Here's a screenshot..

[ATTACH=CONFIG]33719[/ATTACH]

 

Ok let me tell what is occurring here and luckily not really a bug on the Aurender side. The Mac file system HFS utilizes the concept of a data and resource fork where the resource fork can contain other things like the icon, embedded thumbnail etc. The main data fork is where the real contents are in just about all cases. Historically there are a few exceptions but not relevant to this discussion. On the Mac filesystem the data and resource fork don't appear separate but when copying to a network drive, particularly one served by SMB like the Aurender, Finder will place the resource fork in a separate hidden file started with ._filename. The reason is a good one if you restored from that location Finder would reassemble the two parts back into the proper Mac filesystem format. In the case of properly assembled music files there is nothing really in these extra files.

 

Now I will say the Aurender scanner did change during the update in the sense that it now tried to scan these invisible files and listed them as unrecognizable. But they were also there in the past the difference is they are being reported now. I am glad they are as I would prefer to not have them on the Aurender.

 

So here is a simple method to remove them using Mac unix commands.

 

 

1. First mount the Aurender music drive (if you have an Aurender with multiple disks you will need to do this per disk).
   
2. Using Terminal on the Mac (under Applications->Utilities) navigate to the mounted volume - $cd /Volumes/Music1
   
3. You can execute the following command to just list all the files to confirm you have the command line correct - $find . -name "._*"
   
4. You can then execute the following command to remove all of these files which is essentially just passing the results of find to remove
   - $find . -name "._*" -exec rm {} \;
   
5. You can execute a clean scan using Conductor if you want to verify none exist.
   

 

My last word of advice is to not use Finder to copy the files. There are many tools that when copying ignore creating these resource forks including utilizing even built in unix copy commands like rsync. I personally use a program called Chronosync. If you used Finder a lot you will likely also have a bunch of .DS_Store files on your Aurender as well. .DS_Store files contain information about folders and spotlight metadata. You can use the same commands above to remove these files replacing "._" with ".DS_Store". Again utilities like Chronosync, rsync either ignore these files or can be configured to ignore them.

 

Hope this helps and happy to help others further. After the upgrade did this procedure on 3 different Aurenders.

 

Carlin "Rick" Smith

[SirAtilla]

Most certainly you would yes.

 

Carlin "Rick" Smith

[SirAtilla]

Hi Rick,

 

Thanks for this detailed info. My question for you now is: WHY do you prefer to not have those files on the Aurender?

 

I mean, I've been getting those "unrecognized files" report too as I use the scanner. However, those music files are, in reality, still there and still play fine.

 

So, why might I want to play around with Terminal -- where if you make an error, there is the chance of some unwanted things happening -- when the reality of playing music with the Aurender has not been changed?

 

Dave, who has been using Mac computers for over 30 years now and is comfortable enough with Terminal but is asking these questions with a more general perspective

 

Dave,

 

Because they have nothing to do with music playback and they are not music files. They also generate so many errors in the scanner log that if I had a real issue with a file I would never see it as it would take significant time to scroll through that list to find a real issue.

 

I want to make clear your Aurender does not play them and they are excluded from the Conductor database. So when you say the files play fine it is the original music file not these duplicate files with the ._ prefix.

 

The unix commands are a one time clean-up. I would recommend using copy utilities that don't place the files there in the first place. On the Aurender the only real risk you have from a mistake in the command line might be deleting the music files which are stored elsewhere for archival or backup purposes anyway. Nothing about the underlying systems files are exposed to the user.

 

At the end of the day Dave these extra files won't hurt anything if left there but it certainly isn't clean.

[SirAtilla]

Okay, Rick, that makes sense.

 

But could you more clearly list the Unix commands, since when I copy-and-pasted, I got error messages.

Such as this:

 

Irving-Main:~ Dave$ $find . -name "._*"

-bash: .: -n: invalid option

sure -

 

After mounting the Aurender disk change directory to your Aurender Music Disk

 

cd /Volumes/Music1

 

command to list all files

 

find . -name "._*"

 

command to remove all files

 

find . -name "._*" -exec rm {} \;

Dave being in the correct directory is very important since as I constructed the command it starts in the directory you are currently in and recursively looks at all folders below that directory. I can't tell in your message if you are in the directory at the root of the Aurender disk.

 

You can always use the command

 

pwd

 

which should give you an output of

 

/Volumes/Music1

 

this will confirm you are connected to Aurender disk

[SirAtilla]

Thanks, that worked just fine even though these files haven't been an issue before. Since I keep my music library on another disc, I guess it would make sense to use rsync or something similar to keep the Aurender local library synchronized with my "master" - I just need to find out how to replicate the changes - guess I have to read the man-page for rsync!

 

Still, this doesn't solve the problem with duplicate album entries in the album view. I filed a support request yesterday to Aurender regarding this but haven't heard anything yet...

 

Glad it worked for you. Will be interesting to see the result of the duplicate album issue as while I don't have multi-disc albums split in separate folders from some previous testing of albums of different audio resolutions can definitely confirm the Aurender previously would combine like metadata discs regardless of physical file location.

[SirAtilla]

Thanks Rick!

When investigating this further I and since I have been copying albums back and forth from/to the Aurender, I realized that the Aurender adds some invisible files/folders as well that at least I don't want to have on my master. There is a folder .aurender for each album and that folder contains files like auThumb*.jpg that are thumbnails of the album art.

 

Currently I'm testing a sync command to copy all new/modified files from my master to the aurender, and it seems like this could work. This is the command I'm testing:

 

rsync -avz -n "/Volumes/Media Backup/Aurender/" "/Volumes/HDD1"

 

The option -n will just list all files that will be copied without actually doing any copy. Any thoughts/ideas on how to improve?

yes I noticed the hidden files on the aurender as well when troubleshooting this issue.

 

My only suggestions off top of my head is I would use avr options (r for recursive versus z for compress). You can also use the --exclude option to specifically ignore .DS_Store files if any exist on the Mac side.

 

rsync -avr -n --exclude ".DS_Store" "/Volumes/Media Backup/Aurender/" "/Volumes/HDD1"

I can play around with this a little later this evening and post some further comments. I want to test what happens if I change say a folder name does it fully replicate and remove the old folder name. Believe it will. There a few other options that I used like --inplace in the past that can improve performance.

 

One of the reasons I use Chronosync (trying to not sound like an advertisement as no affiliation) but after I import and curate metadata on computer I just launch a pre-configured job to sync up the Aurender. The job mounts, copies, un-mounts, and e-mails me a report of the activity which may be my favorite part. You could do much of the same if you wrapper your shell script with your rsync command in an Automator Workflow.

[SirAtilla]

Bad news... I got the following reply from Aurender:

 

Regarding your question, it is not a bug since we changed the way the scanner software detects albums. This is reflected in our release notes on our website: “The rule for detecting albums has changed. The folder (directory) is the boundary for an album, so that tracks (music files) for an album should be located all together under the same (direct) folder. Music files duplicated over the folders are no longer treated as the same album.”We had many end user requests for this for multi-CD sets and box set content. If you would like multi-CD content to be presented as one album, you can locate the files in the same containing folder and they will appear as one album.

 

They seriously suggest that I should reorganize my music library to comply with how they now think it should be organized to get it to work the way it did before! I understand that they want to support box sets - hey, I want that too! - but why not do that in some kind of smart way - for example by using additional tags, providing flexibility to the user.

 

I'm very close to give up and sell this wonderfully sounding piece of hardware, only because the software isn't given any attention and hasn't been improved for the 2,5 years I've had the box unless of course your #1 priority is streaming. Really sad, but true

You know I did read that in the release notes last week but since I already store things that way guess it didn't really register with me.

[SirAtilla]

Interesting new software update for most Aurender enabling MQA unfolding in the Aurender via a $49.99 license.  Quite a few other fixes as well with the new firmware.

 

See http://www.aurender.com/blog/new-software-release-note-4/post/system-sw-4-5-11-36-app-2-9-3-93-189

 

Carlin "Rick" Smith

[SirAtilla]

2 minutes ago, rickca said:

That link shows a price of $54.99 for the MQA core decoder license.  Surprisingly expensive.

 

The big news to me about the new release is:

Support for Merging Technology NADAC and RAVENNA compatible DAC.

 

In the app it is $49.99 despite the screen shot.

[SirAtilla]

I am actually quite a skeptic on MQA but for $49.99 plus tax to continue to experiment with at least unfolding (my current DAC doesn't do rendering) is a no brainer for me.

 

Here is my N10 display while streaming a MQA track off TIDAL

 

 

[SirAtilla]

1 hour ago, edje said:

Anybody tried the new conductor app? It is launched today in the App store!

 

yes looks great.  On my 12.9" iPad Pro I can see significantly more albums than before which is also nice.  The ability to protect (aka backup) your ratings and playlists is also a nice edition.

[SirAtilla]

Grabbed this from the Aurender Korean web site outlining the difference between the W20 and the new W20SE that is being shown at the California Audio Show starting today.

 

[SirAtilla]

42 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Check a couple different albums. Then check the meta data that Qobuz is sending. I did this and found that Qobuz wasn't sending the correct or same metadata for each track. 

 

For example, Mazzy Star's album So Tonight That i Might See shows up as Mazzy Star for both the artist and album on my Aurender. Switching to Jack DeJohnette's album Jack DeJohnette's Directions shows both artist and album name appropriately on the Aurender. Looking at the Qobuz metadata shows the discrepancy. 

 

Seeing artists on left and right hand side of my N10 displays with Qobuz.  Album doesn't seem to make a difference including the Jack DeJohnette's album you mentioned.

[SirAtilla]

Thanks Ari I figured that was the case and pretty easy fix.

[SirAtilla]

For my fellow Aurender users I spent some time exploring the backups that can be created using Conductor V3.  I discovered while not necessarily the documented purpose of the feature I was able to successfully author a playlist on the computer and then restore to the Aurender essentially acting like an import.

 

I wrote up all the details in this blog article along with some other technical details about star ratings etc.

 

https://www.sound-lab.com/blog/aurender-playlists

[SirAtilla]

On 5/16/2020 at 8:32 AM, wjt3 said:

Has anyone come up with a good way to back up their Aurender?? I have the ACS10 and use Mac/Apple computers

 

Thanks

 

I keep a copy of my music library connected to my iMac on an external drive.  I consider this the master since in my case I edit all metadata here as at times have done large scale complex batch operations using the computer.  I use the application Chronosync to update my Aurender when I make changes to the library master.  What is nice about a program like this as you can have it auto mount the Aurender drive(s) and unmount once syncs are made and also ignore things like macOS specific invisibles such as .DS_Store from being copied to the Aurender file system.  These are harmless if they are copied but prefer to keep it to just the music files.

 

Given the countless hours through a decade plus of curating my library I would be at a loss to lose it.  I therefore use a disaster resilient strategy to protect against loss.  The music library is backed up in-side house with Apple Time Machine to a Synology NAS.  This means within house at any one time I have a copy on Aurender, on disk connected to iMac, and in a backup on the NAS.  In addition I run monthly off-site backups to AWS Deep Glacier using the application Arq.  1TB per month on Deep Glacier is about $1/month so if the house would ever burn down I could get my library back after replacing the equipment.  Google Compute has a similar offering and you can use other cloud providers as well.

 

Cheers,

Carlin Smith

[SirAtilla]

23 hours ago, rwwjr44 said:

I also use AWS Deep Glacier. It is inexpensive and reliable. The only problem is that retrievals can be slow.

 

This is true and google does not have this restriction on retrieval time.  For my use case of Disaster Recovery (DR) I would only retrieve or restore in case of a castrophic failure.  Any normal restore will come from my in-house infrastructure.  This is essentially a cheap insurance policy.

 

Thanks

Carlin Smith

[SirAtilla]

On 5/24/2020 at 10:50 AM, wjt3 said:

How do I save the playlists? thanks

In Conductor use Settings->Backup & Restore.  When you click backup a set of files will be placed on file system of your Aurender that you then have to copy/move to some place for safekeeping.

 

I wrote a blog on how to edit this and even create playlists on the computer here https://www.sound-lab.com/blog/aurender-playlists.

 

Thanks

Carlin Smith

[SirAtilla]

I have been experimenting with an Apple Silicon (M1) based MacBook Air and the ability to run iOS apps on the machines alongside normal macOS apps.  I attached a screenshot of dCS Mosaic running which was directly installable from the AppStore and Aurender Conductor running which I had to extract from an iPad and hand copy over to machine.  Windows are not resizable and things generally work.  

 

Early experimentation at this point.

 

Carlin Smith

[SirAtilla]

9 hours ago, agladstone said:

Is this only possible on the new M1 chip, or is it the newest operating system that makes it possible? 

 

It's only available on the M1 chip as it is a similar ARM based processor architecture as iPad/iPhone.

[SirAtilla]

22 hours ago, Cappuccino said:

Ah looks like this maybe my stupid fault. Changed my NAS over the weekend to a new model and the IP address is different. Just had a look at playlists and the m3u file references the old IP.

 

ok so i can sort this file easily on my PC, however the rate.db file, which i suspect stores the favourites, i cannot open.

 

anyone know if this can be edited

It can be edited as it is a SQlite database.  I wrote about this in a blog post in 2019.

 

https://www.sound-lab.com/blog/aurender-playlists

 

Hope this helps