Wow, wrote a long post about an error, and something called "Wordfence" blocked my post and deleted my draft.  Apparently it interpreted the output I pasted from Beoutil as a hack attempt!

Anyway, the command «watch» exposed a B&O error I had been lamenting for months now:  if I am playing Deezer on all my 3 products, and then tell the A6 to start playing N.MUSIC, and then join the Essence, now all 3 products are playing N.MUSIC from the ML/NL Converter.

But «watch», applied sequentially to all 3 products demonstrates that «Type: NOW_PLAYING_STORED_MUSIC / Kind: playing» still reports as the current song/album/artist/artwork whatever last played on Deezer!  B&O fails to update this to N.MUSIC, which should be the minimum, much less to profit from any N.MUSIC metadata.  This error is reflected in the B&O app by showing whatever final Deezer artwork, and ignoring the current N.MUSIC.

I had thought the error laid on the app itself, but I guess it is something in the code of the ML/NL: it probably fails to send an update to the network.  Sad, if so!

That wouldn't surprise me.  In my experience B&O products have a lot of software bugs that the app would need to work around if it wanted to provide a consistent user experience on top of them.  This could be a quirk of the ML/NL converter that older app versions had special handling for.  It's also possible they broke something in a firmware update without realising it.  They don't seem to test their software properly.

One of my other B&O related coding projects is a piece of software that simulates a BeoSound Moment.  It shows up in the B&O app and can be controlled by it, but it doesn't actually play any music yet.  I hacked it up to better understand how beolink multiroom audio works, with the intention of writing a small app for Mac OS that would allow me to join my Mac to audio playing from a BeoSound in another room.  If I took that software and combined it with the ML Streamer Tinker Edition (see here https://hallaudio.com/en/produkter/the-ml-collection/ml-streamer-tinker-edition/) it could be used to build a totally open-source ML/NL converter replacement.  Support for Airplay, Tidal, etc, could all probably be added as well, providing a nice upgrade over the official ML/NL converter.

I have a prototype web frontend for B&O products and I might share some screenshots of if people are interested.  It has support for discovering active "experiences" as B&O used to call them, shows the track info and artwork for music, has basic playback controls, and allows you to adjust the volume of each "listener" or product joined to an experience.  It's basic but doesn't look too bad. In the course of coding this up I've found several bugs in the speakers firmware.  The most egregious are:

• Speakers randomly stop producing sound when they finish one track and move to the next one.  There doesn't appear to be any way to detect this, because they still give progress updates and report themselves as not being muted.  Adjusting the volume doesn't help, but pausing the speaker and unpausing it seemed like it did.  Because the speakers are moving through the track even though they aren't producing any sound, you end up missing out on whatever they should've played, unless you start the track from the beginning again.  This is pretty bad IMO and should never have escaped B&O's internal QA.
• Speakers suddenly forget they are part of an "experience".  This caused me some serious head scratching and thought for sure I had a bug in my code.  I had music playing on my BeoSound Stage and then joined my BeoSound 2 to it, but for some reason only the BeoSound 2 was reporting itself as having an active source (the one playing from the BeoSound Stage), yet both were playing music, something I can easily verify with my own two ears.  This also confused B&O's own app, which showed the BeoSound Stage as having "No source".  Other folks may have seen this as well.

I'm going to file bugs with B&O because this really isn't good enough, and I'm quite sure these bugs haven't always been in the firmware of these speakers.

Here are some screenshots showing a multiroom "experience":

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How much I wish it was the same thing to remotely control or even just monitor iTunes from a mac to another…

I'm looking forward to the web based tool, too! Very nice effort.

If it doesn't need the latest and greatest browser to get accessed, that would be good solution to use older devices to control B&O even if their operating system doesn't support any other apps. :)

Looks like a great initiative!

It looks like it wold bump Beoplay Remote GUI from my Mac!

https://github.com/tlk/beoplay-macos-remote-gui

I wanted to make a note somewhere of a bug I've been running into with the Beosound Stage: it seems that if I turn my TV off using the Beoremote in the evening I'm not able to turn it on again using the remote or the app, but I've discovered using the app to put the Beosound Stage into standby seems to get it out of this state, and after that I'm able to control it again using both the remote and the app.  Sending the AllStandby command to the Beosound Stage using beoutil also seems to pull it out of this weird state.  I will open a ticket with B&O when I get a chance but I have not been impressed with their support so far.  They will probably ask for something dumb like a screenshot from the app.

Just an FYI for anyone with a Mac with apple silicon can run the iPad version of the B&O app on their Mac Desktop/laptop etc with all the same features as the iPad app.  Been working great for me for years.

Indeed... B&O iPad app on Apple Silicon works perfectly. Never touched the Essence Remote on my desk since the app is running on my Mac Studio / MacBook Pro.