Audirvana Plus 3.5

[Innocent Bystander]

Has v3.5 added the ability to browse and search by file structure, a facility that sadly has been missing to date?

 

if not, does anyone know why it seems to be such an elusive goal?

 

This feature, which I have highlighted before and others have on the A+ forum, would nicely complement the metadata-based library function. It would open A+ to enjoyable use by those with extensive collections having missing, incomplete, inconsistent or incorrect metadata, with neither the time nor energy to go through and add/correct the data on hundreds of albums, instead wanting to use all too precious time to simply listen and enjoy music.

[Innocent Bystander]

10 hours ago, Jud said:

 

You can effectively have something like that if you use the Tracks or Albums view and have File Location as your first sorting criterion.  

Thanks, Jud.

This is not an option in my version of A+ (2.6.8 - I didn’t upgrade to 3 because I have no interest in MQA, and until now I don’t recall mention of this facility in v3.x ). I wonder how well it would work where albums have bad or missing metadata.

 

A couple of questions:

1) Does that view start at the highest level and allow drilling down to where the albums are (e.g. if there are folders for each artist,  each containing the individual albums as folders, can it show the artist level, then when one is selected show the albums in it? 

 

2) Then having selected a folder containing albums, do the album folder names then appear as you had named the folders, or do they at that stage appear using the metadata album name (which might not be the same)?

 

If you, or anyone else reading this, has albums stored in a conventional nested folder file structure, e.g. Genre\Artist\Album name is there any chance, please, of posting screenshots of say the level showing albums, and the one above (artists in my example)?

 

Many thanks!

[Innocent Bystander]

On 4/22/2019 at 11:35 AM, Innocent Bystander said:

Has v3.5 added the ability to browse and search by file structure, a facility that sadly has been missing to date?

 

On 4/23/2019 at 11:00 PM, Jud said:

You can effectively have something like that if you use the Tracks or Albums view and have File Location as your first sorting criterion.

 

On 4/24/2019 at 12:14 PM, Jud said:

It will group tracks or albums according to your indexing criteria. So if your first criterion is file location, your second is artist, your third is album, and your fourth and fifth are sample rate and bit depth, then your albums will be grouped by file location (alphanumerically) first, by artist within that file location, by album within that artist, and by sample rate and bit depth within that album.

 

OK, this whetted my appetite, and I have installed a trial version of 3.5. 

 

And, indeed, setting local library albums first sort criterion to be Audio File Location works wonders!

 

Not as flexible as full file structure browsing with drilling down because it is all presented in a linear way. However, although cumbersome (even with my fairly modest collection of about 1200 albums), the genres I assign through file structure are at least grouped now so I can to scroll through to the one I want. (Metadata genres are a PITA as there are far too many, requiring editing of almost everything)

 

Now at least I can readily see albums that are duplicated or split, sitting side by side, which facilitates checking their metadata to find out why. Whether any albums are still missing or if this now shows them will take me a while to discover.

 

Thanks to Damien for this facility - albeit I know because of Jud’s response: thanks, Jud

 

BUT - it only works in the program itself, not from the remote app, and as I run my Mac Mini Headless, and using VLC to control is more of a hassle than the remote, I hope it will be incorporated into the app very soon.

 

Now I just have to decide if sonic differences between 2.6 and 3.5 are either negligible or positive!

[Innocent Bystander]

1 hour ago, kinver said:

sound difference in different versions of Mac OS. When using Audirvana 2.x.x I tried High Sierra resulting in reduced sound quality in my opinion. I`m now back on Sierra. Still haven`t decided if I will try Mojave. Others with the same experience?

 

I stuck with El Capitan because of the direct mode issue. (Yes, I know that there is a work-around, but I couldn't be bothered, and as the Mac Mini is dedicated to Audirvana playing music there seems no reason yet to change.)

 

Are you using direct mode and with the workaround? If not, I wonder if doing so would  make A immune to whatever Apple may have changed affecting the sound.

[Innocent Bystander]

2 hours ago, kinver said:

I am not using direct mode,

I wonder if that is the issue - maybe using direct mode there would be no changes with different ios releases, as otherwise you are susceptible to whatever changes Apple makes to the drivers.

[Innocent Bystander]

1 hour ago, 57gold said:

Clicked on it and only saw my DAC selected, didn't see that there was more to do.

Not sure if that means that’s as far as you got? If you didn’t get further: when you select your DAC in the pop-up, you should see an arrow to the right of it. Clicking that brings up another menu...

[Innocent Bystander]

1 hour ago, copy_of_a said:

hmh... not sure. For me it worked pretty well from the very begining. Small bugs are "okay"... at least nothing I would complain about.

What is not "okay", IMHO, is to change the processing pipeline (the order of processing steps that is) without telling us.

As a long time user of Audirvana I would expect that an update doesn't change the processing order ... but I somehow felt something changed and this is why I've asked Damien. Now, with the new order of processing steps there is no way to apply Dither after upsampling (in case we use upsampling to high rate PCM) ... and we are left with truncation distortion and without any option to fix this by ourselfs (the new processing order makes it impossible to apply a Dither plugin after SRC).

Dither is such a basic (and important) feature and I really cant' believe Audirvana doesn't provide decent Dither options. Turns Audirvana from a great product into an unusable amateurish product. Well, maybe it applies Dither "under the hood" ... but by now we don't know since Damien doesn't tell us.

Luckily 3.2.16 is still running ...

 

I’m unclear why a software developer  should tell us every internal change he has made. As for your concerns surely the proof of the pudding is in the eating: does the latest version sound better or worse than the previous? If better, or the same, what does it matter what changes have been made? However If the new version sounds worse, and there is clearly an issue and that would need reporting to Damien and in the meantime reverting to the last good version. And if Audirvana does sound good, as indeed it does, If that is without dither, then ckearly for not having dither doesn’t mean the program is rubbish ! Apologies if somewhere I have misunderstood your point.

[Innocent Bystander]

1 hour ago, Thibaw said:

Upgrade to 3.5 was a pretty seamless installation and its now sounding terrific. However, it stops after each track and I need to manually advance to next track. This never happened with previous version.

Any ideas?

Is that running as a renderer, feeding a DAC direct, or UPnP player? 

 

[Innocent Bystander]

3 hours ago, alfamatt said:

Having just upgraded to the latest version, I’ve noticed that several albums now seem to be split in two, with the majority of tracks on one album & then a duplicate with 3 tracks on it. Never had this with Audirvana plus.

I’ve had that in v2, right up to 2.6.9, and put it down to a metadata glitch, though no amount of scrutiny found the cause. It was one of my reasons for wanting browsing by file structure, and forever frustrated. Now that with the new version I can set the first search criterion to be file location, my split albums have magically unsplit. (Thanks, Damien!). If only everything including filenames could be as in my file structure all would be perfect, imperfect metadata be blowed!

[Innocent Bystander]

Apologies if this has been asked before, but a quick search hasn’t found for me.

 

I have not yet upgraded from 2.6  however I’ve been trialling 3.5.  I think i want to upgrade to 3.5, however whilst I am happy to pay the upgrade cost, I would like to retain my 2.6 install unaltered, just in case I change my mind (the trial period is a bit short to really decide). 

 

I have taken the trial of 3.5 as a stand-alone, not upgrade, and it only gives the option of buying at the full price. Alternatively I can go from within 2.6 and select upgrade - but I assume that will replace 2.6, which isn’t what I want.

 

Any ideas for how to do it? 

 

Thanks