Euphony OS w/Stylus player setup and issues thread

[biosailor]

8 hours ago, al2813 said:

Tried the core + stylus ep this evening and indeed this is a nice combo. I will do more testing this weekend but this looks so far the winning formula. 

How does this combo work? It uses Roon core, but what does the stylus ep do? 
 

Sorry for the dumb question, but I‘m a bit confused with all the options.

[biosailor]

I finally found out what the problem with my library and Euphony Stylus was! The file structure in my library was artist folder containing several albums of the same artist. While in other players, like Audirvana, such file structure worked without problems, but Euphony gets confused. I simply dragged the individual albums into Euphony, and so far it works without hiccups! One exception, though, is one album that gets stubbornly split into two. I do suspect a tagging problem with this album.

[biosailor]

17 minutes ago, dminches said:

 

I am not sure why having multiple albums in a folder is an issue.  That’s how my entire music collection is organized.  I have a folder for each artist and within that folder I have folders for each album.  Euphony has no issues with that.

 

My only pet peeve is that if you have a CD1 and CD2 folder they will appear as separate albums even if all the tags are the same.

 

 

I don't understand it either, as I used to have such a file structure before. But it's the only way I can get the library working. Mysterious!

[biosailor]

I give up! 
 

Now that I thought I had finally set my library up , I start Roon core it starts to mess up things badly!

 

In the attached file you see the second album from Harry Allen/Jan Lundgren ,Quietly There‘. Roon now supplies a cover with Chet BakerI have never seen nor do I have it any where in the library! When I click on it, the correct album appears, though.

 

Other albums are also affected: an album from Feenbrothers ,Play Dave Brubeck‘ is covered with the face of a Saxophon player, presumably Grover Washington, and Grant Green appears as Herbie Hancock!

 

I guess I am just too stupid for this sophisticated piece of software 🤔!

 

 

 

[biosailor]

Finally progress with Euphony Stylus! Certainly not wanting to leave this thread where it was in the end!

 

In my library, my files are ordered by artist folder, and the artist folder contains all albums of this particular artist (see SS0 attachment). Upon import into Euphony's music folder, many albums got split into two, mostly containing track 1 (attachment SS1), and all other tracks were split into a second album (attachment SS2). Such splitting never occurred when I pulled an individual album without being embedded in a higher order album artist folder. But, in my library, I have a number of albums entitled 'Ballads' from various artists, which without artist association would cause problems in tracing the album to the artist.

 

In the information tab of the split albums, I noticed that either of the two had Artist and Album Artist annotated identically (SS3), but the second had Various Artists annotated in the Album Artist entry (SS4)! Correcting Various Artitst to the same name as Album Artis made the splitting disappear (SS5).

 

I opened a ticket with Euphony concerning this issue and Zeljko suggested going to the Album folder in Files View and clicking the blue DB icon while holding CTRL key (option key for Mac, see SS6). I tried this, but it made things worse. So eventually, I had to go manually through a large number of albums to correct the Album Artist.

 

Why this happens in the first place, I have no idea. All albums had been correctly tagged in MusicBrainz Picard.

 

Let's see how stable the library is. Once I reached a stable library, I see if this nasty Roon mix up re-occurs. But I tackle step-by-step and I am satisfied that I reached at least this level!

[biosailor]

4 hours ago, dminches said:

 

For what it's worth, there are many ways to configure Roon with respect to how it process your library.  You may have some "bad" Roon setting which is making decisions about your library that are contrary to what you want.  It isn't as though there is only 1 Roon approach.

 

In the end, Euphony will sort your music based on the tags.  In many ways it is much simpler than Roon which tries to apply its own view of your music into the library view.

 

I learned a lot while fixing my library Euphony Stylus! In the end, it turned out to be quite simple, once you know where to look! 
 

Euphony‘s library management reminds me a bit of Audirvana, relatively simple and efficient. 
 

Roon, I agree, overdoes it regarding library management!

 

I just bought a full Euphony license and I am very satisfied now. But it took some learning to get there 😅.

[biosailor]

In the meantime, I managed to solve the problem of mixed-up covers when running Roon Core in Euphony. In > Settings > Setup, I needed to Clear Cache, and in the Settings > Library > Import Settings I changed Metadata preferences for albums to 'Prefer Roon' (see attachments). I don't always get the same album covers as in my library, but at least there's no mixing up of the covers. 
 

All is good now! Next project is setting up a NUC or similar!

 

 

[biosailor]

2 hours ago, Joerg D said:

Hello
I like Stylus because I like the sound very much. Actually I listen with Roon. But now I want to get to know Stylus better and I have some questions about how to use it.
It would be nice if you could help me.
How do I assign tags to songs and how do I create playlists and assign playlists to songs?
Does it matter whether I select in the setting that the music is loaded 100% into the memory or whether I select the function 
"Buffer queue to Ram " ?

Thanks for your help

Joerg
 

 

I find that Euphony manual pretty awkward, and I'd appreciate too if the community here would help beginners by communicating their experience they gained by setting it up.

 

I myself had a hard time to get things going and for the moment I am using it for running Roon. That's the simplest setup, at least for me.

 

Here's just a bit of what I gained to answer your questions:

 

Assigning tags can be done in the album info. If memory serves me well, an album has three dots in the upper right corner. If you click on them, you get to the album info. In the album info you can change tags the way you like by clicking on the editing menu. See also my post from Saturday 23rd Jan.

 

I checked 100% buffering of music in the settings menu, but I haven't used Buffer queue to Ram (and I probably won't).

 

The people at Euphony Audio are very responsive, so you can also contact them, or open a ticket should you run into problems.

 

I keep my fingers crossed!

[biosailor]

5 minutes ago, TheAttorney said:

Best to always select "Buffer before play=100%" to load the current track into RAM before play starts (and also loads next track for gapless switchover).

The "Buffer albums added to queue" is an extension of the above and buffers the whole album(s) into RAM (up until the RAM becomes nearly full). Some report that this further improves SQ, I haven't noticed that so much. Both these options apply to local music files (streamed files from Qobuz etc only buffer current and next tracks).

 

As has been mentioned, I and some others think that the biggest single SQ boost you can do is to enable ramroot, which loads the entire Euphony operating system and Stylus player into memory, which means that disc I/O is greatly reduced. This is in Expert Settings and I don't think it's described in the user guide. Boot time is obviously increased with ramroot, but it's worth it.

 

There are other SQ-boosting options in System -> Expert Settings, which requires further explanation, but first get ramroot going.

 

 

 

Good explanation, thanks!

[biosailor]

So, in regards to buffering, once that option is ticked, does this also hold for Euphony running Roon Core? There's this discussion over at Roon Labs Community asking for implementation of buffering tracks before playing them, just as Audirvana does.

 

Also, has anyone compared SQ between Stylus and Euphony running Roon Core? Is there an audible difference?

[biosailor]

3 hours ago, davide256 said:

Buffering only seems to happen when Stylus is the active server.  I didn't renew Roon this year, it didn't match the clarity and midrange timbre integrity of Stylus

under A/B comparison using Euphony, found the only time I was using Roon was if I was curious about discography and related music

Thanks for your impressions!

 

Roon for me is a complicated story. I used to run it on my Mac Mini 2018 feeding into a Raspberry Pi 4 and then USB into my Devialet. That sounded thin, boring and brightish. This is in no way a one to one comparison, but running Roon in Euphony on an old MacBook Air and USB-ed straight into the Devialet, Roon sounds so much more involving that I start to like it!

 

But admittedly, listening with Stylus is a better, richer experience, for sure!

[biosailor]

3 hours ago, walloon said:

 

I agree. Currently testing Roon using the free trial period. Library management and music info are great but is it worth the price? Not sure if I will go for the 1 year licence. Still 7 days left to consider.

 

As you say, Roon's library management is fantastic with all its features. My impression has always been that this is more important to Roon than sound quality. On the other hand, I wished Euphony would be just a bit more feature-laden! In many ways it reminds me of Audirvana, but sound wise it's even better.

[biosailor]

How do you people connect your NUCs/laptops to Euphony to your DACs? I have no other option for the moment as to go straight USB from my MacBook Air to my DAC (Devialet). I know this is not the best solution. I tried UPnP in Euphony via RopieeeXL on a Raspberry Pi 4 but this does not work. I also tried to activate WiFi, but that doesn't seem to work either.

 

Any other options?

[biosailor]

5 minutes ago, dminches said:

 

I don’t disagree that Roon has a lot of non-audio features but I am curious what you think you are missing in Stylus with respect to library management features.  It doesn’t pull information from anywhere than the audio files themselves, something that Roon does a ton of, but I think it organizes a library well.

 

 

It's good, no problem! Taking Roon as an example is not fair. If Euphony would resemble Roon, then it becomes Roon! I think it's important to make the distinction between a good audio player, like Euphony and Audirvana and something that tries to go further, like Roon, but sacrifices the most important, namely sound quality!

 

One thing, though, it would be nice if one could choose genres in Qobuz. Maybe it's possible, I am so new to Euphony that I need to get used to it.

 

But it's a great player!

[biosailor]

34 minutes ago, Speedy381 said:

You could use a separate USB to digital out, that may isolate any nasties in the USB. I run my USB from NUC into a Matrix Spdif2 and out to i2s with good results over just USB. Especially when the Matrix is powered by a linear PS. More boxes. 

Thanks!

 

Does anybody know if a Micro-/Ultrarendu can be used?

[biosailor]

42 minutes ago, stefano_mbp said:

I’m trying Euphony since few days .... the sound is really good but ...

the library management is the worst I’ve ever found (compared to Audirvana and JRiver) and, the most important bug (anyone realized?), there is no gapless at all using HQPlayer .... this is unbelievable .... here end my trial ....

 

Indeed, library management is not at the level of those high tier players like JRiver or Roon. But it does its job. I had to get used to it myself, and there is quite a bit you can do in terms of tagging. The manual (http://audiokernel.com/EuphonyGuide.pdf) helps.

 

Don't know about HQPlayer, I don't use it. Too many possibilities to play with!

[biosailor]

2 hours ago, stefano_mbp said:

My library is fully tagged, I’m using Minimserver and I can manage 16 tags to browse my library.

The problem with Euphony is that there are too few tags available and they are not very useful for classical music, to say a couple of indispensable they are Works and Solists, not to mention Orchestra, Conductor, Instruments and others 

It a real pain browse 8TB of classical music using Euphony ...

You should perhaps drop a note at Euphony's to incorporate more tags. Shouldn't be too difficult, as they seem to use SQLite for databank handling. Myself being a Jazz fan, I fully understand the difficulties of proper tagging classical albums!

 

Never worked with Minimserver, to me it seems a bit complicated. I am used to MusicBrainz Picard for tagging, but I'd like to have a better tagger at hand.

[biosailor]

42 minutes ago, al2813 said:

I have been now playing with Euphony for 2 weeks. I would have loved to keep Roon as my front end due to its interface, but even compared to Roon + Stylus EP, the Stylus player is just better. The only problem is the library - killer issue. Want at least to clean up the files (until now I let Roon do everything <sigh>). Anyone can recommend me a good app to do this ? mac preferred. 

 

 

 

Clean up, you mean tagging? There's a whole lot of it available for Mac. It just happens that there's a recent thread over at the Roon User Forum about Taggers for Mac

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/can-anyone-recommend-a-meta-tag-editor-for-macos/138306

 

 

[biosailor]

1 hour ago, dminches said:

This is not an attempt to convince people about Stylus but I am curious what people find problematic about finding their music in Stylus.  I have used jriver (which is the most powerful in terms of setting up views and rules) and Roon (which has the nicest interface but its rules limitations for each focus is limited) but I don’t find Stylus too bad as long as you clean up your tags.  The systems is unforgiving with respect to tags but once you clean them up I find stylus to be fine.

 

I have a number of filters which allow me to get to my music pretty quickly.  Once I set them up I found the software to be decent to good.

 

 

I find Stylus a bit buggy. For example, when I shuffle by going to 'Songs' in the menu, start a track, and activate the shuffle symbol, a pop up menu tells me that the first track I am selecting is unavailable, though it plays perfectly well! The error message won't disappear by itself. For that matter, other error messages just keep staying there. Bit of a nuisance.

 

Also, I haven't found a way to look for genres in, say, Qobuz. But that could be me just not having found the proper menu. If someone knows ...

[biosailor]

17 minutes ago, stefano_mbp said:

Just tap on it, it will disappear 

I noticed, but it shouldn’t be there in the first place ... 

[biosailor]

I certainly agree that Stylus sounds very, very good, no doubt about it!

 

I hope I am not imagining this but using Roon via Euphony sounds better than running Roon Core on its own. I know this comparing apples with oranges but having Roon activated in Euphony on a MacBook Air sounds better than running Roon Core on a .Mac Mini. Both systems feed via Ethernet into a Radpberry Pi 4 with Ropieee as bridge. Roon via Euphony has clearer and better defined highs, devoid of any digital glare, and better bass.

 

Whatever it is, I truly like Roon in this environment!

[biosailor]

2 minutes ago, maxst67 said:

I'm sorry I didn't understand how you are using rpi4 .... I would like to understand if rpi4 can be used as Euphony EP .... thanks

I‘m sorry, my mistake! I have a Raspi 4 running RopieeeXL. THERE‘s this option in Stylus to tick that searches for UPnP devices on your LAN. When ticked, it does recognize RopieeeXL as it shows it’s logo on the lower right corner. But from whatever reason, Stylus does not stream to RopieeeXL. I opened a ticket at Euphony’s and they looked at the issue, but were unable to solve it. Perhaps they should talk to the Ropiee people to fix the issue.

 

When, however, running Roon via Euphony, Roon streams perfectly well to Ropieee(XL). You just manage this in Roon‘s audio settings.

[biosailor]

13 minutes ago, maxst67 said:

Thanks for the reply .... It would be nice if Euphony extended the use also for rpi, it would open a world .... personally i would connect rpi4 via i2s to my dac ..... which i did before with Daphile with a good sound improvement .... I think it would be an option that many of us would enjoy ..

 

Quite so! But it's in the hands of the Euphony people to get this going.

 

I'd like to do i2s, but my Devialet has no input for this 😬!

 

Daphile is amazingly good, extremely stable and simple.

[biosailor]

3 minutes ago, stefano_mbp said:

I suspect an Euphony issue as I tried with a SoTM sMS 200/MPD&Dlna and it doesn’t work too .... 

So they should gear up to make UPnP work properly!

[biosailor]

Another quirky behaviour of Euphony running Roon: when I try to set up the backup location on the external SSD I have my library on, Roon tells it doesn't find the drive. Does Euphony restrict access priorities?