audioexchange

I have spent six weeks in the company of the Bluesound Node. Having gotten over the disappointment of 1. not being able to output 24-192 to my Benchmark DAC 2 & 2. The absence of DSD decoding. I have been using the Bluesound exclusively to stream 24 bit files from my server and CD-Resolution streams from TIDAL. Overall, I have been quite pleased with the device – using analogue outputs the sound is bright and open – probably audiophile. However, the app has been driving me (partially) insane. I have a maybe 6000 high resolution files in my library, and I have spent countless hours having to re-tag virtually everything.
The first and most annoying thing about the Bluesound app on the iPad, is that, when first used half of my album art did not appear on the albums. I must point out that I had already art-tagged all of the art-empty files using MUV-Under cover, and the art appears on (the annoyingly flakey) J. River Media Centre. On many of the albums – remember these files can be up to 200 mb, there was a message “album art too large.” I have used Sonos for years – and it sucked in files and spat out album art regardless.
So I went to the Bluesound forums and found that if album art is more than 600kb in size then it rejected. So, I went back to the albums, stripped out the album art, then re-arted the files with <100 kb artfiles and re-indexed. Guess what? Same problem. I then discovered, that the Bluesound is actually quite lazy – it goes to the folder containing the album looks to see if there is a cover.jpg or folder.jpg file and uses that as the artwork, rather than what is embedded in the file. As HDTracks downloads often contain high resolution artwork – this appeared to be the problem. So I took all of the cover.jpg images and resampled them downwards, re-indexed and…guess what: same problem. So I then deleted all of the folder.jpg files (often there were both), reindexed and it worked. Have you any idea how long it takes to redo high resolution artwork files over a home network – ages! The other issue wit the blue sound is the 120,000 other 16 bit files that I have on the other server – it would be nice to use the Node as my only streaming device for my main system. This is not going to happen for 3 reasons:
1. The artwork issue – I would be suicidal.
2. There is no way to have separate libraries for High Resolution and Normal Resolution files.
3. Artwork display is extremely slow: when you scroll on the Bluesound app, the artwork pictures pop-in (from blank to art) which is really annoying. My old Sonos remote (5 or 6 years old) displays 20 times the number of cover images (albeit in thumbnail) without this problem. Hell, the Squeezebox app did a better job…
Anyway – it is working well now. The device works well – but I don't see it as my longterm: I would give the device 6/10, and the app 6/10 also (Sonos 9/10, app 9/10 but no high resolution).

~ by Pat Neligan on February 12, 2015.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Bluesound Node, High Resolution audio, ID3 tags, Sonos