HQPlayer Linux Desktop and HQplayer embedded

[cat6man]

will install later tonight.

thanks

[cat6man]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

After some hammering I got the problem "reproduced" halfway through an album with MinimServer and BubbleUPnP App. For some reason it didn't proceed to the next track. Reason is a sort of mystery to me so far. I'll try to check out that Adroid power save option which is similar to macOS' AppNap...

 

 

did you see bubbleupnp drop back to local renderer?

[cat6man]

I installed b15.

Played an album this morning and it played fine, but when I opened bubbleupnp to pick a new album to play, the renderer had dropped back to local renderer.

 

So then I disabled local renderer as well.

 

After playing fine for a while, in the middle of a track, while mobile was stationary, the music stopped and i found that the library in bubbleupnp had changed connection to another dlna server on my network.......seems like a bubbleupnp or network connectivity problem for the lost renderer stoppage.

[cat6man]

I found another thing to tweak on my phone.

 

I use PIA as a VPN and I changed PIA settings so bubbleupnp always bypasses PIA.

 

Another thing i might try is disabling PIA on the phone when I'm home playing music.

[cat6man]

Thanks Miska.  Didn't have a chance to do any more testing with b15 as I was away taking my daughter back up to college.

Installed b16 and testing now.

[cat6man]

On 2/8/2018 at 3:34 AM, Miska said:

 

Are you starting hqplayerd with the provided systemd service file?

 

Hi Miska,

 

I'm running beta19 but starting the program the way I always have, opening 2 command windows, typing "hqplayerd" in one and "rygel" in the other.

Can you explain the systemd service file and what changed?  My old method seems to work fine.

 

Also, my system has been very stable since the latest bubbleupnp updates.  In particular, in addition to turning off the local renderer as I always have, I have hidden both other renderers (only sees hqp4) and other libraries (3 others are found on my network).

Previously I would find that the renderer had changed to local renderer and sometimes the library would also change.

Now that there are no other choices for bubbleupnp to pick, it seems much more solid.

[cat6man]

any info on beta22?

[cat6man]

Well, I've hosed my hqplayerd setup somehow and need to do a clean installation.

Basically, I was trying to change to the integrated startup (where I didn't need a special call to rygel) but

the script I ran uses different default locations than my installation, so I've likely confused things completely.

 

Anything special I should do to cleanup before doing a new installation.

Clearly, I'll keep my license and configuration files backed up.

I just want to make sure I don't leave things pointing to non-existant locations, startup processes, etc.

 

Thanks

[cat6man]

On 3/26/2018 at 7:00 PM, Miska said:

If you use Debian or Ubuntu and install the provided package, you just disable whatever old startup stuff you had, install the new package and enable it's automatic startup with "systemctl enable hqplayerd".

 

To enable UPnP support, check out the <upnp> element in provided example configuration file.

 

 

i think part of the reason i hosed things was that i had hqplayerd and hqplayer (from earlier testing) and i was getting confused where the controlling config files were, etc.

 

so i backed up key files, uninstalled both, deleted both .hqplayer and /etc/hqplayer directories, then did a clean installation.........and i once again have glorious music

 

now i just have to remember how to remotely configure settings (like which login/password is hqpe asking for?)

i really should take notes so i can make new mistakes and not repeat ones i know i've solved in the past!

[cat6man]

On 3/30/2018 at 11:46 AM, cat6man said:

 

i think part of the reason i hosed things was that i had hqplayerd and hqplayer (from earlier testing) and i was getting confused where the controlling config files were, etc.

 

so i backed up key files, uninstalled both, deleted both .hqplayer and /etc/hqplayer directories, then did a clean installation.........and i once again have glorious music

 

now i just have to remember how to remotely configure settings (like which login/password is hqpe asking for?)

i really should take notes so i can make new mistakes and not repeat ones i know i've solved in the past!

 

just to clarify, i forgot i had to re-authenticate after blowing away my old installation......then remote configuration worked fine.

[cat6man]

since volume control has been an issue here, i'll relate my experience.....maybe it will help someone

 

i have a ultraRendu, usb out to dxusb-hd (converts to aes/ebu, bitperfect) to DAC.

when i set rendu to mpd/dlna, all was fine.

when i set rendu to NAA, i had no sound.

 

it turns out that bubbleupnp has separate volume settings per renderer, and since i had the volume hidden in bubbleupnp (not planning on using it), i had no idea that volume was at 100% for mpd/dlna and 0% for NAA.

 

how it got that way i have no idea, but once i unhid the volume it was an obvious and easy fix

[cat6man]

On 7/10/2018 at 7:13 PM, Miska said:

This is also what I do on two servers at the moment; use the standard minimal Ubuntu Server as a starting point, nothing else installed except SSH server. Then install my 4.14 kernel build which is optimized for this use case unlike the one installed as standard on Ubuntu. Then install libgmpris and hqplayerd packages and then fetch the missing dependencies with "apt install -f". That's pretty much it. Just set the configuration username+password with "hqplayerd -s username password" and restart hqplayerd service.

 

Network configuration is straightforward through /etc/network/interfaces file.

 

This should be good basis for Roon Core as well. Putting anything extra on my bootable images is tricky at best, so they are best as-is.

 

regarding the minimal installation...........i understand that this will create more horsepower for complex computations.

however, if the processor is very light loaded and easily handles all signal processing, is there a SQ advantage to a minimal installation versus a standard Xenial desktop implementation?

[cat6man]

21 hours ago, Miska said:

 

If you use a NAA it doesn't matter from sound quality point of view. If you connect directly to a DAC, it may lower the noise in USB output which may lower noise implications with the DAC.

 

 

As I expected.  Thanks for confirmation.

[cat6man]

On 9/25/2018 at 2:43 AM, Miska said:

 

It indicates a potential problem though. HQPlayer has tens of threads inside, each running at carefully designed different priorities. Failures to set priorities are not treated as fatal and HQPlayer doesn't terminate due to those failures, but the performance is potentially poor and one can experience for example drop-outs or inefficient processing. My packaging manages the system setup for the supported distributions, but for any repackaging one has to pay special attention that the related system setup is correct (work directories with correct permissions, priority settings, etc).

 

For HQPlayer Desktop it is important that user id's who run HQPlayer are members of "hqplayer" group. For HQPlayer Embedded, this is all set up by the packaging and the service runs as special user "hqplayer".

 

 

just ran across this................i have had the 'failure to set priority' warning ever since i started using hqplayer embedded but, since it still played, i ignored it.

 

i run using command line in multiple terminal windows, typing 'hqplayerd' in one and 'rygel' in the other.

 

i am not experience dropouts or processing problems (i am not scaling at all, just feeding a NAA) but i do fail to get gapless playback...........could this possible lack of prioritization be related to playback gaps with bubbleupnp?

[cat6man]

12 hours ago, Miska said:

 

Is your userid member of "audio" group? That should fix it.

 

You don't need to run Rygel separately anymore, unless you also like to use it as Media Server. If you just need it for Renderer functionality, you can enable it as built-in functionality in the config file. Simplifies things a bit.

 

No, gapless doesn't depend on that. Sometimes BubbleUPnP is a bit slow to trigger next track and then there's a gap. It happens more with Tidal than with local UPnP playback because with Tidal (and other cloud services) there's somewhat unpredictable additional delay over internet before the stream begins to flow.

 

 

i only use a local NAS.  what is a reasonable gap size to expect with bubbleupnp?

would it be a function of track size or the time for the DAC to empty its buffer of the previous track?

 

is there a full featured client other than bubbleupnp that does a better job and is faster to trigger the next track?

[cat6man]

18 hours ago, arglebargle said:

4.5 for Bionic is an amazing update. Being able to initiate playback with no other control/library/etc software is a game changer. Cheers! 

 

could you elaborate please?  i don't see this in the readme.txt file.

[cat6man]

On 10/2/2018 at 5:14 AM, Miska said:

Regarding gapless, yesterday I was playing entire Deep Purple's Made In Japan concert through A+ to HQPE without any gaps. Playing the same from same computer, but using MinimServer + BubbleUPnP (on Android 8.1 on Google Nexus 6P) gives some small gaps so far. And I do have "Enable gapless control" enabled in BubbleUPnP's renderer settings. And renderer info tells that gapless playback is "potentially supported"...

 

i'd be happy to ditch minimserver 

 

what other options are there for the server that are better equipped to provide gapless feedback?

[cat6man]

On 10/7/2018 at 2:50 PM, Miska said:

 

Rygel does a good job. Someone would need to develop support for DSD files for it, but that wouldn't be actually too hard. Since sox already supports it and that would just need to be bound to a gstreamer element.

 

If you don't absolutely need support for DSD files, then Rygel is good option. I still need to test minidlna and see how it works and how hard it would be to bind DSD support to that one.

 

 

i can certainly live without dsd in the near term............guess i'll have to figure out how to configure rygel

 

[cat6man]

10 minutes ago, Miska said:

Regarding using HQPDcontrol or similar to control HQPlayer Embedded. Typical setup would have HQPlayer Embedded connected to wired network that has wireless access point/router. And mobile device with HQPDcontrol would be talking to the wireless network while HQPlayer is on the wired.

 

 

and that works perfectly here

[cat6man]

Hi,

I see a new embedded 4.9.0 is available (downloading now) but also mention of a new NAA 3.5.6

Is there a cubox image for NAA 3.5.6 somewhere?

[cat6man]

On 7/11/2019 at 4:34 PM, Superdad said:

 

Per the Signalyst.com web page, there are now two DACs available with NAA built in:

The $26,000 T+A SDV 3100 HV (https://www.ta-hifi.de/en/audiosystems/hv-series/sdv-3100-reference-streaming-dac-preamp/)

and the $6,200 TotalDAC d1 Streamer (http://www.totaldac.com/D1-streamer-eng.htm)

Not exactly within the budget of the everyman. 

 

well, the d1 Streamer is not really a DAC, so there is really only the T+A

 

the d1 Streamer is a streamer though and can easily become an NAA because it uses a cubox.

in addition to using the SD card from TotalDAC and selecting the NAA, you can always just burn the NAA image (cubox version) to an SD card and insert that into the d1 Streamer.

 

then, if you are counting streamers (and not just DACs) that support NAA, the Sonore micro/ultra/opticalRendu all support NAA

[cat6man]

11 hours ago, Miska said:

 

You can do the same with microRendu too. It is not CuBox-i, but it uses same i.MX6 SoC and I added definition files needed for it, so the image is now combo-image.

 

Most devices use some COTS SoM and Linux, so adding my networkaudiod is not much problem - unless the Linux version used in the device is too old (which is also quite typical).

 

 

i had assumed that to be the case, but did not suggest that as i have not tried it myself yet.

 

one thing i mean to get around to is a sound quality comparison of NAA image from Miska vs. NAA option selected on Rendu

 

 

[cat6man]

and just to be specific, this is the latest NAA image for the rendu

 

https://www.signalyst.eu/bins/naa/images/naa-3552-cuboxi-urendu.7z

 

 

[cat6man]

I'm in the process of migrating from a Ubuntu-based older NUC (shared with my SageTV server and a family NAS/file server) to a dedicated new NUC7i7 running only a USB image for HQPe and the transition has been very easy so far.  Plug in USB with HQPe image, power on NUC, remote login scan library on 2nd usb input, reconfigure target IP and library location on HQPDcontrol android tablet/app and, voila, music..........very nice.  I was especially pleased to see how quickly it read a 80k+ library (6TB)............I was expecting to check it in the morning but noticed the USB drive had stopped flashing and the library was complete...........didn't time it though...........next time.

 

I plan to do some testing and compare it to my Ubuntu-based server, then move all my music/listening to the new NUC based server.

The only question I have is how to manage the library and configuration when there is a new image/version available of HQPe.

Can I somehow save (how?  where?) the old library and configuration and re-load it or will I have to re-scan the library?

Or can perhaps store the library on my m.2 memory in the NUC?

In other words, how are the .xml and library files stored when using the USB image vs. an Ubuntu installation?

 

Thanks (and LOVE HQPlayer!)

[cat6man]

8 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, there's a backup/restore option in the HQPlayer web interface. So this should be pretty straightforward procedure. "Scope" is "System" when HQPlayer is running as an OS service. ("user" is only when it is started under user session in graphical desktop or such)

 

Backing up library data is probably not so useful, as rescanning it is relatively quick. And HQPlayer Embedded doesn't have editing facilities for the stored data (unlike Desktop), at least yet.

 

 

aaahhhhh..............so the backup is to my remote pc (lightbulb begins to turn on), not on the usb stick?