Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[TheAttorney]

With my head still spinning from all the server options available on these threads, I've decided to go for the KISS approach to replace my W10/Roon laptop as music server. This will be:

 

A single box server with USB out to my existing HMS->DAVE DAC. I've settled on Euphony Stylus running on 7i7DN Porcoolpine fanless box (thank you @bobfa for the posts and links). With Porcoolpine setup just like bob's example, e.g using a 32GB Optane in the M.2 slot. My moto for this exercise will be "ditch the spaghetti" or at least as much as possible - and I'm prepared to sacrifice some SQ in order to get compactness, simplicity and conveniance.

 

With that in mind, I intend to start with Porcoolpine's stock USB output and use its default WiFi (using up the M.2 2230 slot and with external antennas) to connect to my broadband router on the other side of my house). Both of these points are less than ideal for SQ, but I did a "proof of concept" test by installing Euphony+Stylus on USB stick on a (different) laptop -> USB -> HMS -> DAVE and comparing to my existing W10/Roon -> bridged mR -> IR -> HMS -> DAVE.

 

And the Stylus version won easily on SQ, although only after I had cleaned the direct USB output with my trusty ISORegen. This was not a like-for-like comparison, but was enough of a POC for me to imagine that a NUC server would give even bigger improvements.

 

My remaining question is regarding Optane drives: There are many options around, but most of them won't fit into the M.2 2280 slot of DN-boarded NUCs. I'm starting with a 32GB pure Optane to be the Euphony/Stylus boot drive (and with an external filestore drive), but to continue the KISS principle, it would be more elegant to use the H10 drive with a combined 32GB Optane + up to 1TB NAND, thereby keeping everything within the same box.

 

So my H10 questions are:

1. Can one boot Euphony/Stylus from the 32GB Optane partition, which then reads the music files from the NAND partition? 

2. Or is it better to put everything on the NAND partition and use the Optane as accelerator (which is after all its originally intended purpose)?

3. How would a H10 drive compare SQ-wise with Optane + external drive?

 

Solution 2 seems to be the most elegant to me, but it'snot clear if adding the NAND SSD onto the Optane card will make that drive as noisy as a typical SSD?

 

[TheAttorney]

The H10 in general seems a great storage solution in the KISS single box world (as long as 1TB is enough).

I guess no-one has yet tried this though to see (hear) if practice matches theory in terms of how the noise performance compares.

In an ideal world, the Optane front-end would hide the noisier SSD back end, but we all know that practice doesn't allways follow theory.

 

Unless someone's already done such comparisons, I'm aiming to start safe (with the tried and tested Bobfa's approach), then see how bleeding edge this DIY-averse guy wants to take this.

 

Regarding faster,  better servers than the i7DN NUCs - I'm sure there are, but I've been waiting over 2 years for the "A novel way" dust to settle down, and every week there's something better, but not necessarily simpler.

[TheAttorney]

Thank you all, the fog is gradually lifting 🙂.

 

BTW, if drive power consumption is a guide to SQ, then the new M15 Optane adds another variable:

It has faster read/write/latency figures than the M10, and its power consumption is <5mW idle and 3.8W active.

 

So Idle consumption better than the M10, but Active worse. How than affects SQ will probably depend on the music app used.

 

Edit: I'm guessing the Active consumption is greater primarily because it's faster and so shifting more data per second.

[TheAttorney]

2 hours ago, rickca said:

@TheAttorney for now your H10 questions are moot since the H10 is currently an OEM only part.....

Initially, the Optane Memory H10 will be an OEM-only part, available to consumers only pre-installed in new systems....

 

Yes, and as far as I can tell from email correspondence with SimplyNUC, I could have the H10 pre-installed in a Porcoolpine.

However, as result of recent posts here, I'll be sticking with the 32GB Optane, which will be an M10 or M15 depending on what SimplyNUC have on hand at the time.

[TheAttorney]

Regarding custom builds by SimplyNUC, the online options for Porcoolpine apply to the US website. And this has limited options.

 

In the UK (and probably other non-US countries), you can only order Porcoolpine (and probably other newest models) by engaging with a SimplyNUC salesperson - in which case you can request whatever you want and they will provide a quote as long as it's sensible and doable.

[TheAttorney]

Here are some notes from my NUC/Stylus build experience:

 

Introduction:

I’ve been using a W10 laptop music server, running Roon (previously JRiver and HQP). Not the greatest H/W start point, but this “stopgap” was considerably improved by the microRendu 1.4 and ISORegen combo, both powered later by PH SR7 (3 x single-regulated rails).  And I’ve given up waiting for the dust to settle on the various AS experimental threads to determine which is the best consensus supa dupa server.  So time to take the plunge right now.

 

My mantra for the new server is KISS & DTS (Ditch the Spaghetti), whilst still getting substantially improved SQ. Oh, and keep the costs down. So my new server will be resolutely single box. I realise that a low cost KISS & DTS approach isn’t going to achieve the best possible SQ, but I can use this as a learning curve and stepping stone to the biggie supa dupa server in a year or two’s time – and hopefully I won’t even feel it necessary to further upgrade anyway.  Maybe “near end-game” will be end-game enough for me?

 

NUC/Stylus installation and setup:

 

The Porcoolpine fanless 7i7DN-based NUC arrived with Ubuntu pre-installed  on a 32GB Optane drive (pre-configured as SSD).

 

Considering I was a NUC/linux-newbie, the Euphony installation went better than expected. My start point was that I had a mouse, but no monitor or keyboard, so I plugged the NUC into my TV’s hdmi input to see what would happen and was delighted to find that the BIOS screen has a basic level of GUI – including a virtual keyboard, so I was able to make BIOS changes without having to purchase a dedicated monitor or keyboard (I have no intention of mucking about with BIOS changes every other day).

 

My Porcoolpine included the default WIFI&Bluetooth card with external antenna. I activated WIFI from Euphony’s Expert settings and was again delighted to find that it immediately connected to my broadband/router in another room. Which meant I was immediately able to control Euphony from my laptop. Euphony doesn’t formally support WIFI at this stage – the feature is in Expert settings for users to try at their own risk. This is a great result for me because I now have no switches/extenders/ LAN cables in my system  – there are several  options here to improve network SQ, but none of them pass the KISS & DTS criteria. The key steps I made:

 

1.       Plug 32GB USB stick into laptop and download Trial Euphony/Stylus onto USB stick

2.       Boot Euphony/Stylus into my laptop, with direct USB connection to Hugo M-scaler/DAVE. SQ is OK, but definitely improved by ISORegen, so I keep the IR for all remaining steps

3.       Plug USB stick into NUC and reboot

4.       Boot-from-USB was ignored, so I connected the NUC to TV and change BIOS to move USB boot priority above Optane drive

5.       Whilst in BIOS, check that speedstep and hyperthreading are enabled (they were)

6.       Now NUC boots Euphony from USB stick (which is now the “Euphony Drive”)

7.       Copy some music files from laptop to Euphony Drive (I can get dozens of my favourite albums onto this 32GB stick)

8.       Listen to music for a couple of days. Result: improved detail & dynamics than before, but  bit ragged in the higher frequencies. So, it’s promising, but not a clear win

9.       Replace stock 19v SMPS with PH SR7’s 19v 7A rail and PH 6A silver DC cable. Result: Absolutely FANTASTIC! Simply better at every possible level, and there’s no going back now.

 

Next steps:

10.   Purchase the full Euphony Stylus license and install on the Optane Drive

11.   Put my music files onto a 256GB USB stick (all my redbook compressed FLAC files fit easily with room to spare) and directly connect to NUC USB socket . Then compare SQ of files on Optane versus files on USB stick.

12.   Do something about the NUC’s DC power socket (see below).

13.   Live with this as long as possible and try hard not to succumb to upgrade-itis, unless it conforms to KISS & DTS. So, replacing one cable with a better one is allowed. Adding anything extra will be resisted – especially if that thing requires a power supply.

 

Initial thoughts on Euphony Stylus:

No surprise that the UI feels rather clunky after Roon’s, but I’m slowly getting used to it. The album and artist direct links to LAST.FM are not as integrated as Roon’s, but not a bad alternative. E.g. LAST.FM will give me loads more artist photos etc compared to the often-cropped single Roon photo.

 

In Expert settings, you can choose max/min CPU frequency, which doesn’t always work, as others have noted. But it works enough to do this test: Any setting above CPU’s 1.9 Ghz baseline gives you near this CPU’s max frequency of 4.2 Ghz. But setting max frequency to 1.9GHz does set actual frequency to exactly 1.9Ghz. I preferred the more detailed and dynamic max frequency setting.

 

When set to max frequency, the NUC AC power consumption hovers around 15-18W, irrespective of whether music is actually playing. This isn’t very much really (I don’t do any DSP on the server).  But if you never switch off your server, and would like some form of standby option, then setting max frequency to 1.9 Ghz reduces power consumption to 6-8W, as well as reducing the NUC temperature.

 

Initial thoughts on Porcoolpine:

I’ll post some impressions in due course in the Porcoolpine thread, but for now, this little cutie is all good apart from one issue:

 

The DC input socket requires a not-very-common 3-ish mm ID, 5.5 OD barrel plug. So neither of my existing 2.1 ID and 2.5 ID plugs would fit. Luckily, my old iFi 9V power supply came with a bunch of converter plugs, and one of them successfully converted my 2.1 ID plug to 3-ish ID. But an el cheapo converter plug will do no favours to SQ, so any suggestions of what best to do here?

 

I’d rather not mess up my PH silver DC cable with a non-standard plug because of future flexibility. So my default solution is to replace the NUC DC socket with one suitable for 2.1 ID plug. Another option is to make use of the 7i7DN’s onboard molex 2x2 micro socket in some way, but that would entail drilling a hole into the NUC enclosure.

 

 

 

  

 

[TheAttorney]

On 6/26/2019 at 8:19 PM, bobfa said:

I am excited to hear more.  Can you post a couple of pix of your hardware?    Where exactly have you landed on the CPU frequency settings?  

I got diverted by an issue when installing Euphony onto the Optane drive (after purchasing the full license):

 

The install went fine, but I lost my WIFI on booting from Optane. So I had to temporarily rig up all sorts of extension cables to get an ethernet connection to my remote broadband router. I was tearing my hair out because I couldn't see what the problem was, and was not looking forward to persuading  Euphony Support to support me on an unsupported feature. Then the solution literally popped up to me with a message saying that I wasn't on the latest version and would I like to get the latest feature upgrade? On upgrade to the latest version (29th May), WIFI worked fine. Phew! Happy Days. The lesson here is that Install won't necessarily install the latest version even though the USB stick I was installing from did have the latest version.

 

Back to CPU frequency. I've found that I can go from Full Throttle to Standby by changing just 1 digit in the Max Frequency setting as below. I find the Standby very useful for significantly dropping both power consumption and CPU/case temperature:

 

This results in the frequency and temperature results below:

 

 

[TheAttorney]

13 hours ago, Nenon said:

In my system Euphony sounds better when loaded from my Optane card compared to loading from a USB Drive. But the trial version does not let you install the image on your SSD or Optane card. I think this is a bad decision on Euphony’s side, because you cannot test the full potential of Euphony.

 

 

It's not unusual for a trial version of any app not to have the full set of features enabled, and in this case I don't think it matters much because...

 

It's early days in my Optane vs USB stick comparisons, but one thing I can say right now is that any improvements with Optane are tiny compared to getting a top quality power supply, and small compared to, say, getting good quality cabling in your system. Therefore you can get a sufficiently good idea of what Euphony is capable of, even if booting from USB. Yes, Optane boot may be better still, but so are dozens of other tweaks that can be made to yor NUC.

 

BTW, once booting from Optane, I ran a simple test: With Euphony caching (and 100% buffer) enabled,  I loaded a few albums from my USB stick into the Euphony play queue, then started playing. Then removed the USB stick from the NUC. I heard no difference in SQ whether or not the USB stick was in place. Which means that a USB stick is a perfectly viable long term solution to store your music files, as long as your collection is small enough to fit (and with 4 x USB slots in a typical NUC, that means 2TB is easily achievable, and even 4TB at a much higher price).

 

My bottom line is that USB drives can be improved upon, but for the purpose of evaluation, there are much more important considerations.

 

[TheAttorney]

48 minutes ago, Nenon said:

....... you can hear improvement on some motherboards and not on others. Just saying - things are not as black or white as it may look. In other words YMMV. 

 

I completely agree, and I wasn't claiming my experience with my particular 7i7DN-based NUC is in any way black and white, just my particular experience with the h/w that I had described in recent posts. I'm a firm advocate of YMMV 🙂

 

Also, my USB comments were based on a 256 GB stick. If your friend had issues with much greater capacities, then that is something that requires further investigation for anyone who is thinking of going down that track. I suspect this will also vary with different motherboards etc. But for those who have smaller music collections, I still think a USB stick can't be beaten for KISS & DTS - you don't ever have to open up the server, or worry about M.2/PCIE slots, or NAS networking issues etc. 

[TheAttorney]

On 7/8/2019 at 5:18 PM, austinpop said:

Has anyone tried the CPU isolation feature on the latest 0705 version?

 

Where did you get the instructions for changing this feature in Euphony? I haven't seen any.

 

Does core isolation in effect switch off hyperthreading? I'd like to give that a try, but it's much easier for me to change this in Euphony than in BIOS.

 

I don't see the point of the other new feature - CPU burn-in. It drives the cores to 100% usage, at 3 levls of aggressiveness, but IMO the CPU already heats up more than enough in turbo mode. This enhancement request probably came in from another forum. I wonder what the rationale was?

[TheAttorney]

13 hours ago, RickyV said:

I have also been playing with the CPU frequency but there seems to be only two settings and that is 1.9ghz and max, which is 3.8~4.2ghz. If I put 1900000 in the max freq field I get 1.9ghz. If I put 1900001 in I get max, 3.8~4.2ghz. Is this correct?

 

Sort of correct. This is how the CPU Frequency function works with this particular CPU/motherboard. Remember that anything in Experts Settings is Beta/experimental that has been included at users request - it is not guaranteed to be perfect in all circumstances., although the support team will attempt to fix issues where possible and practical.

 

In this case, the CPU's base frequency is 1.9Ghz. And any setting at this frequency (or below) will respond correctly. But any setting above base frequency seems to revert to whatever the BIOS settings are, i..e go to full turbo mode in this case. Other CPU/motherboards may behave differently.

 

As I reported a while back, I found this feature a very handy way of going into and out of a pseudo standby mode: I just change the first digit to effectively engage turbo mode (which sounds better) and go into standby mode when I stop listening for the day (which considerably reduces power consumption and temperature). 

[TheAttorney]

On 8/22/2019 at 9:47 PM, austinpop said:

You could try and compare these (remember each physical core has 2 logical CPUs, i.e. HW threads):

• 0-1 stylus 2-3 gstp 4-7 < -- this may be good for standalone  (core 0 for default, core 1 for stylus, core 2-3 for gstp)

Beyond this, feel free to experiment.

 

I did try that, plus a few variations, on my 7i7DN standalone Stylus server when you posted this, but I couldn't decide if the subtle differences I was hearing were real or imaginary. So I stopped trying.

 

But yesterday, when I was looking at the temp/CPU graphs, it seemed to me that, when just playing music (with no DSP), Stylus was putting least load onto the CPU, gstp was more load, but "everything else" was the biggest load. So I allocated more cores to "everything else":

 

    0-3 stylus 4-5 gstp 6-7

 

And this gave me a (literally) clear improvement in SQ (in short, a reduction of smearing), and I'm now a believer. Of course, there may be further variants, but nothing obviously improved on this and I soon got bored with trying.

 

This was with turbo and HW on. One unwanted side effect of these changes is that any change from the default 0-7 seemed to increase core temperature. E.g. with default, Core 0 typically fluctuated between 58-65C. With above new setting, Core 0 jumped to 68-75C, whereas Cores 3 and 4 stayed lower. Now, the strange thing is that allocating even more cores to "everything else" did not reduce that highest temperature and, in general, isolating cores did not always correlate to what I was expecting in terms of CPU load and temperature.

 

My amateur conclusion to the above is that core isolation, especially with turbo/HW, is more complicated than one might think. I'm guessing that the CPU is at least partly overriding the isolation request in order to stop itself from overheating or to run more efficiently.

 

But irrespective of whether that is true or not, I feel the above new setting is very worthwhile for me.

 

[TheAttorney]

16 hours ago, davide256 said:

 

Did a rerun compare of 1TB HD Seagate media  vs  1TB class 10 SDXC media, SDXC still wins out for clarity, treble/bass sharpness. I have a 32gb optane stick arriving today, I plan to retest once that arrives.

My hope is that Optane SSD using Euphony cache option will improve  sound and eliminate media type sound quality differences.

 

My default position is Euphony Stylus booted from 32 Optane M.2 card, and redbook music files on a 256GB USB stick directly plugged into one of my NUC's USB slots. With 100% buffer, caching, turbo, HW and recent core isolation. And I'm very happy with the sound. BTW, caching doesn't always appear to be immediate when adding  new files to the playlist, and Stylus gets tempremental  when I try to add several albums in very quick succession. But it gets there eventually

 

I again removed the USB stick whilst music was playing from cache (there's about 20GB available for cache on a 32 GB Optane, which holds several redbook music files). And I again couldn't reliably tell if there was a SQ change when removing the USB stick, so even if there is a slight SQ impact, I'm prepared to accept that in exchange for an incredibly simple and low cost filestore solution for my NUC server.

 

I also tried ramroot from the trial Euphony on a different USB stick, but didn't get very far.

Firstly, on a brief initial comparison, ramroot did seem a bit better than boot from USB stick, but it wasn't sounding obviously better than my memory of the boot-from-Optane default. At this stage, it was too short a test and too many variables for anything to be conclusive, but then I ran into a problem:

 

Having activated ramroot, I then hit the disable button and rebooted. After ages, it still came up in ramroot, even though the info in the ramroot field and button seemed to acknowledge that I had indeed disabled it. So I retried and the same thing happened. As I don't have a monitor to connect to my NUC server, I can't follow the boot process for any clues, so I soon got bored with this and gave up. It doesn't help that my trial ramroot was created onto the only spare USB stick I had, which is several years old and probably contributing to the painfully slow boot up time.

 

Maybe the Euphony team could consider why I wasn't able to disable ramroot?

In the meantime I'll just wait for this function to be fully released, so that it can go straight to my Optane drive.

 

 

[TheAttorney]

There appears to be an anomaly with the Core Isolation feature:

 

It reverts to the default of No Isolation after reboot, so I need to hit the Apply button again after each reboot - worth knowing for those who don't run their servers 24/7.

[TheAttorney]

1 hour ago, RickyV said:

How do you see it’s gone back to default? I have switched back and forth a few times the last two weeks with no difficulties. 

 

 

Firstly, the Core 0 temperature increases after applying my particular Isolation settings (as previously posted). After reboot, the temperature reduces to the default values. If I hit the Apply button at this point, the temperature starts increasing again.

 

Secondly, I believe that hitting the Apply button with an empty field will show the actual core values without changing them. If I do this after applying Isolation, the display shows the correct values. If I do this after reboot, the displays shows the default values (0-7 for everything). Tip: Remember to Ctrl/C your isolation settings before clearing the field, so you can quickly re-instate then later.

 

Thirdly, by listening. If I re-hit the Isolation Apply button after reboot, I get a boost in SQ. Any subjective test is not totally reliable, but that's what I hear. It's harder to notice this on reboot because of the larger time lapse and because even default sounds pretty good anyway.

 

[TheAttorney]

20 hours ago, austinpop said:

Are you by any chance setting the isolation flags:

• while booted in ramroot, and
• do you have the flag set to copy app data to root?

 

No, I'm not using ramroot. I tried again last night with the same results as before. It could be a CPU/motheboard-related issue: If my 7i7DN board doesn't fully respond to CPU frequency settings, maybe it also doesn't fully handle core isolation as well? RickyV may be able to answer that question when he tries my tests - as he also has a 7i7DN-based server.

 

But more interesting for me is that today I've found a better sounding Core Isolation setting 🙂.

I disabled Turbo and HW (hyperthreading) in BIOS to see if that changed the Core Isolation reboot issue (it didn't). I then reinstated Turbo because that is  required to get CPU max frequency above its base frequency. But left HW off (Fidelizer's designer believes HW is detrimental to SQ in his experience, so I wanted to test that out).

 

So, with only 4 real cores available (and Turbo on), I found that    0 stylus 1-2 gstp 3   gave me even greater clarity and dynamics - the best yet. Strangely, with HW off, stylus now causes the highest CPU load, and Everything Else the least - the opposite of what I saw before - goodness knows why! That's why I allocated 2 cores to stylus to stop it going beyond 70C. Overall, CPU temperatures are a few degrees C lower than with HW, so a good result in every way.

 

This uplift in SQ is not fully conclusive at this stage because I also recently made a tweak to my headphones - I think I have seperated the two changes, but more time is needed. In the meantime I do recommend others try the disabling HW - of course this could be CPU dependent.

 

7 hours ago, Lukasluis said:

I would like to experiment on the effect of CPU isolation but I don't know the name of the applications/processes when running Roon/Euphony. 

Just hit the Core Isolation Apply button. This will display all the relevent processes. As your default position is an empty Core Isolation field, hitting the Apply button will display current values without changing them.

[TheAttorney]

With hyperthreading disabled in BIOS the last couple of days, I'm really enjoying the sound. One bonus is that the max frequency doesn't seem to matter as much as before: It sounds good whether it's set to 0.9Ghz, 1.9Ghz or around 4Ghz. That's not to say they sound exactly the same, just that I can as easily engage with the music with any of them. Even Core Isolation doesn't seem to matter as much - maybe I'm just getting comparison fatigue?

 

So I'm sticking with max frequency of 0.9Ghz, which results in a huge CPU temperature drop to just under 40C (with correspondingly reduced power consumption). A further bonus is that these lower speeds do not suffer the temperature fluctuations of turbo mode.

Strangely, at the low speeds, "Everything Else" is back to showing more CPU activity than Stylus, so I've come full circle on that point.

 

So, with HW off, Max Freq= 0.9Ghz, Core Isolation = 0-1 stylus 2 gstp 3,  I get a great sounding, cool running, low energy, no fuss solution that I'm delighted with 🙂. Even if a max'd out turbo'd and hyperthreaded version sounds a bit better (and I'm not sure it does), I've stopped trying. No more changes from me until the ramroot function gets fully released.

 

[TheAttorney]

17 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

New official version released today. Ramroot enabling, etc.

 

I gave ramroot a try.... and I like it... a lot 🙂

 

No issues at all with installation and activation, and works well with my Optane still being used to cache the directly connected USB stick filestore.

 

I've been sticking to my simple settings on my NUC7i7DN: 1.0Ghz, HW=off, core isolation, caching and buffering as previously posted. And now with ramroot, I'm even more delighted with the SQ - considering the low stress being put upon my CPU (typical core temp 37C, and Porky's cooling fins don't even rise to "barely lukewarm"). So much sound from so little energy (around 8W from earlier measurements)!

 

The exact CPU speed seems to matter in this configuration: I slightly prefer 1.0Gz to, say, 0.8, 0.9, 1.2 etc, but this could just be imagination because the differences are much more subtle than, say, ramroot.

 

Also, this release improves the upgrade process for those totally reliant on the WIFI function to access Euphony/Stylus - WIFI on previous releases became inactive after the upgrade process. Euphony Support said they'd fix it at next release - and they did 🙂. Great support.

 

 

[TheAttorney]

On 9/11/2019 at 9:28 PM, RickyV said:

Yes ramroot seems to deliver more air around instruments, voices etc. Better defined space. Real nice.

 

Only 2 days later, another "new feature" release 20190912 has appeared:

 

I haven't spotted any new features , but SQ seems to have further improved in a particular way. The previous release did indeed have more air, better defined space, greater clarity and focus in Ramroot. But further listening to my brighter recordings showed that it was not shy in showing up the brighter aspects of the recording.

 

This new release seems to have added a more full bodied, natural presentation (what Euphony Stylus was originally praised for), without any apparent loss of that ramroot clarity. My reference point has changed several times in the last few weeks, so I'm no longer sure whether the latest changes are real or imaginary. Maybe I'm just getting used to the new sound? Or maybe something else has changed in the background? But whatever, I'm really, really enjoying this new release.

 

 

[TheAttorney]

One observation with Ramroot:

 

After upgrading from '10 to '12 release, and having shutdown and restarted a couple of times since then, I noticed that I was back to the '10 release. I hadn't bothered to do the "save root fs to disk" before (on assumption that upgrade would sort that out automatically), so this time I did save fs and this time it stayed at '12 after reboot.

 

Maybe it was obvious to everybody that you need to do that save function after every upgrade if using Ramroot, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

[TheAttorney]

On 9/15/2019 at 7:15 AM, AnotherSpin said:

If you decide to keep ramroot enabled and loaded you will need to disable ramroot before updating or making system-wide changes in Euphony.

Yes this will work, but it's simpler and faster to keep ramroot always enabled and just hit the "Save root fs to disc" after an upgrade or after any config changes. This will ensure that RAM and disc are always in sync.

 

19 hours ago, davide256 said:

RAM root  loads the needed OS  and (when enabled) configuration files to RAM so that no disk access is required  for Euphony program to run.  For whatever reason Euphony states you can't access the My Music directory in RAM root mode.

 

This statement is rather misleading depending on the context. My take is that....

 

Enabling Ramroot copies all the root filestore to RAM, such that no disc access occurs in the running of the Operating System, resulting in improved SQ due to (it's suggested) reduced latency and noise. With just Ramroot enabled, you still get full access to your music library and music files.

 

If you check the "Copy app data to RAM" option just above the Ramroot Enable button, you will additionally copy /data to RAM. This completely stops all disc access, which further reduces latency and noise. And now you can remove your external drive which possibly may yet further reduce noise.

 

However, that additional option is a moot point for me because usability takes a severe nosedive in exchange for a dubiously small improvement in SQ - at least when caching to Optane and 100% buffer enabled. So this additional option I feel is more for those who want to test what is ultimatly possible, rather than for those who want to enjoy their music collection with minimal fuss. The biggest boost to SQ is to just get the Operating System loaded into RAM - and for that there is no loss in music library function.

 

[TheAttorney]

There is now a knowledge base article about ramroot, which gives much more information than any of us could provide.

You can get to the knowledge database from the Support link in the Euphony app, or directly from the link below (which will require a login if you're not already logged in to their support site):

 

https://euphony-audio.com/hesk/admin/manage_knowledgebase.php?a=edit_article&id=14

[TheAttorney]

On 9/17/2019 at 5:58 PM, davide256 said:

so a configuration verification here;

do you use NAS storage solution  or are you using directly attached storage media?

based on your outcomes, I'm suspecting NAS.

 

No, I'm using a directly connected USB stick (thumb drive).

I don't see any fundemental difference, wrt ramroot usability, between NAS vs direct connected filestore.

[TheAttorney]

8 hours ago, Nenon said:

This is the option I am excited about:

- Added option to buffer entire Queue to RAM

 

 

Where is this option located? I can't find it anywhere, but I seem to have it set anyway because there is now no buffering when skipping to next track, and most of my queued items are marked blue. I say "most" because I currently have over 100 tracks in my play queue and only 4GB RAM, which is shown to be over 80% used (and marked red, implying a limit is being reached). Despite this low memory, Stylus keeps playing and adjusting what's marked Blue, so I imagine it's dynamically adjusting what's buffered when it gets to RAM limits.

 

EDIT: I've found it now, at the top of the queue. It displayes that 100 tracks are buffered, out of 117 currently in queue. But there is still a small bit of disc activity when skipping tracks.

 

One small enhancement (that I had requested), that's not listed in the change log, is that the current track playing is now always in display whenever you get back to the play queue. Previously, returning to the play queue always went to the start of the queue, so you then had to scroll down to find the track playing - significant when there's a long queue spread over several pages. This now works well.

 

Click on artist name opens artist's page on LastFM

I'm a bit confused about this one. I had asked for the ability to see all other albums by an artist when you are on the Now Playing screen of that artist (a roon-like feature). This has been implemented when you click on the artist name on the Now Playing page. In practice, this has been done by a filtered search, but you then have to go to library view to see that result. I'd rather you were taken directly to that result if that's possible.

 

Not sure how that relates to the above change log entry, or if that is a different feature that I haven't spotted yet.

 

[TheAttorney]

Yes, I've since edited my post in the meantime with more info. Anyway, I'm pleasantly surprised that this feature works at all, considering I'm using ramroot and queue buffering with only 4 GB RAM (not doing any DSP probably helps).