Audirvana Plus 3.5

[AudioDoctor]

@jamesg11 said

"“better ways” ... riff on this please!"

 

Roon. the UI is so much better it's as if aliens came from the future and handed it to us. And, you can use HQPlayer all you want easily.

[Jud]

7 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

@jamesg11 said

"“better ways” ... riff on this please!"

 

Roon. the UI is so much better it's as if aliens came from the future and handed it to us. And, you can use HQPlayer all you want easily.

 

I'm probably one of a minority who thinks this, but the Audirvana UI is nice and simple for me, while when I tried out Roon the extra things it brought to the table weren't things I ordinarily use or need. The extra information that is part of Roon's reason for being tends to be stuff I already know about the albums I own and their artists/players; I tend not to use searches to find what I want to play, just put everything in alphabetical order and I'm good.

[matthias]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

 

I'm probably one of a minority who thinks this, but the Audirvana UI is nice and simple for me, while when I tried out Roon the extra things it brought to the table weren't things I ordinarily use or need. The extra information that is part of Roon's reason for being tends to be stuff I already know about the albums I own and their artists/players; I tend not to use searches to find what I want to play, just put everything in alphabetical order and I'm good.

 

Same for me plus SQ of Audirvana seems to be superior to Roon.

 

Matt

[AudioDoctor]

4 hours ago, Jud said:

 

I'm probably one of a minority who thinks this, but the Audirvana UI is nice and simple for me, while when I tried out Roon the extra things it brought to the table weren't things I ordinarily use or need. The extra information that is part of Roon's reason for being tends to be stuff I already know about the albums I own and their artists/players; I tend not to use searches to find what I want to play, just put everything in alphabetical order and I'm good.

 

If I may counterpoint this...

 

1) I have a combined 1850 albums in my library between local files and streaming favorites. In Roon, they are all in one place and organized in any number of ways allowing me to browse or scroll or I can search, or I can use the Discover feature, etc...

 

2) There is a limit of how many albums Audirvana will show of my favorites albums in Qobuz. I literally can NOT scroll through my entire library of favorited albums in Audirvana.

 

3) Even if I could, they are not in any order other than the order they were added to favorites.

 

Audirvana has, IMO, one feature that makes it great, and that is when directly connected to your DAC it sounds fantastic, better than Roon when that is directly connected to a DAC. But that's not how Roon is meant to be used. Audirvana sounds so good that it's worth overlooking its faults if you can deal with them and will be directly connecting to your DAC.

 

edit: I use Audirvana when I travel.

[matthias]

6 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

If I may counterpoint this...

 

1) I have a combined 1850 albums in my library between local files and streaming favorites. In Roon, they are all in one place and organized in any number of ways allowing me to browse or scroll or I can search, or I can use the Discover feature, etc...

 

2) There is a limit of how many albums Audirvana will show of my favorites albums in Qobuz. I literally can NOT scroll through my entire library of favorited albums in Audirvana.

 

3) Even if I could, they are not in any order other than the order they were added to favorites.

 

Audirvana has, IMO, one feature that makes it great, and that is when directly connected to your DAC it sounds fantastic, better than Roon when that is directly connected to a DAC. But that's not how Roon is meant to be used. Audirvana sounds so good that it's worth overlooking its faults if you can deal with them and will be directly connecting to your DAC.

 

edit: I use Audirvana when I travel.

 

One additional point for Audirvana:

Audirvana uses the Qobuz API, so you get all new albums at the same time as Qobuz desktop app 🙂

Roon does not use it, so you get them a few days later.

 

Matt

[AudioDoctor]

Just now, matthias said:

 

One additional point for Audirvana:

Audirvana uses the Qobuz API, so you get all new albums at the time time as Qobuz desktop app 🙂

Roon does not use it, so you get them a few days later.

 

Matt

 

True, that is an annoyance with Roon.

[Mike Rubin]

I am the rare person who thinks that Roon, upsampling to DSD256, sounds better than Audirvana on my system.  I only stream over ethernet and never use a USB connection from my control computer to my DAC.  SQ is wholly subjective, though, so YMMV. 

 

Otherwise, you can keep Roon. 

 

I have a huge collection and often change metadata, especially on classical selections.  Roon then is hopeless.  (As an example, on Roon my Miles Davis collection is scattered over at least ten different artist entries for "Miles Davis," "Miles Davis Quintet," "Miles Davis Sextet," "Miles Davis Nonet" (!), etc.) 

 

If I tell Roon to use my metadata instead of its own, it then can't find text to link to most of the albums on which I have changed metadata.  See Miles Davis, where half his albums don't bring up the text about the album because I changed "Miles Davis Quintet" to "Miles Davis."  Further, in so many cases, like with overseas and independent releases, it doesn't even have that text in the first place.

 

I estimate that Roon provides me with zero relevant text for almost 50% of my collection, only doing a decent job with pop music.  Further, much of the allmusic.com commentary is pretty pedestrian (and, since I have to be connected to the internet even to use my system, it's not as though I can't easily access the allmusic.com site while I am using a control app). 

 

Finally, I think that Roon's use of screen real estate is less efficient than any application I ever have used. Audirvana's isn't great, either, but at least there's not wasted white space even when there's no linked text to fill that space. 

 

That's not an endorsement of Audirvana's crude interface, though. With a collection as large as mine, alphabetical scrolling takes forever, so searching is essential for me.  Audirvana, like Roon, is okay for that, but, unlike Roon, its remote apps don't list by recency. (The PC application can, but that doesn't help when you run things off a phone or tablet.). Considering that much of my listening is to what I have most recently acquired, I consider a "new music" or "recent" listing to be critical to usability. In this one respect, Roon's interface creams Audirvana's. 

 

Jud said, correctly, that his view about Roon's interface isn't a majority view, and mine is even less widely-held:  JRiver has everything beat in the interface engineering department.

 

Because it cannot upsample DLNA broadcast music to DSD, I only use it now for library management and metadata editing, but, if it could upsample to DSD without requiring an ASIO USB connection, it would be the only player I own.  Since that's not even on the JRiver roadmap, though, I guess I will be using Roon and Audirvana for the foreseeable future. 

[Bill Brown]

I have been struggling to find a player as well.  I had easily adapted to all the changes as iTunes evolved and used it as my database manager, but the change to "Music" pushed me away.  I run a "full" library on a separate HD and a smaller library on my laptop.  Used to be seamless, now ridiculous.  I was nervous about losing music, etc.

 

Have been with Audirvana throughout as my player, but the UI frustrates me.  I want to see more of each track's info while on the "tracks" display.  Why is the space on the left of each track (play, heart, and options) so wide?  I would love to be able to re-claim more of the space for music, have some options for text size, etc.

 

And why can my BW-limited network stream high-def. video but can't load my library onto the remote app and keep up with scrolling, etc?

 

I checked out Swinsian.  Would be perfect in appearance for me.  Clean, not trying to be hip (or whatever it is).  If it could otherwise do what Audirvana does under the surface I would be all over it.

 

Bill

[RunHomeSlow]

19 minutes ago, Bill Brown said:

I want to see more of each track's info while on the "tracks" display

 

just posting that in case you don't know this, every colomn or categories can be remove or add, stretch or squezze. you can have just one big column like 'Title' and put all in that like you want or just see 'File location'

 

[RunHomeSlow]

39 minutes ago, Mike Rubin said:

Considering that much of my listening is to what I have most recently acquired, I consider a "new music" or "recent" listing to be critical to usability

 

this is the setting of my smart playlist for new additions in the last 30 days... works perfectly... if i change it a day to 15 days instead, it remove all the 15 later albums, can be seen in tracks or albums view...

 

 

[Mike Rubin]

38 minutes ago, RunHomeSlow said:

 

this is the setting of my smart playlist for new additions in the last 30 days... works perfectly... if i change it a day to 15 days instead, it remove all the 15 later albums, can be seen in tracks or albums view...

 

 

Thank you for this.  It should have occurred to me to look at this. I don’t use playlists enough.

[RunHomeSlow]

Smart playlists, so they get updated automaticly

[RunHomeSlow]

i'm not english first speaking, but i always found it strangely written...

 

[Bill Brown]

Very interesting @RunHomeSlow.  I would be very satisfied with that view.  I like track name, time, artist, album, genre, rating.

 

I have tried shrinking the left playlist column and re-sizing the track info columns, but don't seem to get nearly that much info/text on my screen.  Certainly I could get it as wide as as I want it but it is off the screen to the right and requires scrolling over, which them seems to cause problems with scrolling up and down.

 

The small bar at the bottom that indicates the need to scroll left and right seems that most of it is on the display without scrolling.  And it seems like your text is smaller than mine.

 

I will have to go in and play with it some more.  Thank you!

 

Bill

[RunHomeSlow]

I do my editing through mac screen sharing on a 27’ iMac 😀

[Bill Brown]

Have been wondering if that was it.....This is me.  I need smaller font, the "Tracks" column smaller, etc.

 

[Bill Brown]

Now this is what I like:

 

[RunHomeSlow]

you can create smart playlists for Genres like me... that way you can remove Genre tab in track view... you can add a filter the see the album ratings and song rating and click back on it to make it disappear and remove that tab also in window...

 

 

[RunHomeSlow]

yes fonts are big in Audirvana

[AudioDoctor]

ok... Now search your Qobuz favorites for all the HI Res albums from within Audirvana...

 

 

[jos]

On 5/26/2020 at 5:12 PM, jimdukey said:

No luck with the fix for Duplicate  Music Files.

Nothing terrible, but several Dupes.

I did have had this problem too in my situation, where I use Apple Music as my music-database tool. Recently I did take a look in the map where the Apple Music files resides, and I noticed that Apple Music is not always deleting files you remove/delete, so Audirvana is reading this map and of course he finds those music files you don't want. I deleted them manually and then they where gone in Audirvana. Perhaps this solution will not solve every dupe, but it certainly did help me to clean up.

[pl_svn]

16 hours ago, matthias said:

Audirvana uses the Qobuz API, so you get all new albums at the same time as Qobuz desktop app 🙂

Roon does not use it, so you get them a few days later.

use Qobuz.app to browse new releases and mark as favourites those you want: they'll be in your Roon Library right away

[jos]

On 7/2/2020 at 3:10 PM, Jud said:

 

I'm probably one of a minority who thinks this, but the Audirvana UI is nice and simple for me, while when I tried out Roon the extra things it brought to the table weren't things I ordinarily use or need. The extra information that is part of Roon's reason for being tends to be stuff I already know about the albums I own and their artists/players; I tend not to use searches to find what I want to play, just put everything in alphabetical order and I'm good.

I totally agree, and then: if you compare price and sound quality; Audirvana is the the obvious winner IMHO.

[jos]

The 'track #' field is much too wide in my opinion. Is there a way to change that? The title should be: TR or # IMO.

[RunHomeSlow]

31 minutes ago, jos said:

The 'track #' field is much too wide in my opinion. Is there a way to change that? The title should be: TR or # IMO.

see post #2209 up there