Two weeks with the Moment; thought I'd share my experience and wish list..... (sorry for the long post)

Installation

I am using a Mac Mini (OSX Yosemite) with Twonky 7.2.7 downloaded from the B&O website

I made a separate folder (format: music / artist/ album(s) / songs) on the Mac Mini SSD with all the music for the Moment

Copied only the music I wanted to keep from Itunes folders; over the years I had collected lots of music I am no longer interested in (still 10k+ songs left)

Then decided to only leave music on the Mac Mini that was  not available on Deezer; this left me with a little over 1000 songs / +/- 100 albums

On my computer I added all Deezer artists / albums / songs I have in my collection and wanted to keep

Everything worked straight away except............ album art (Twonky) and artist covers (from Deezer)

Fix album art

To fix the album art problem I used "Tag Editor" and embedded 500x500 covers to all songs with no covers (this is usually the case with Itunes libraries 

This then showed around 80% of the covers in Twonky.

For the ones that were not shown (I have no idea why) I created jpeg files named them "folder.jpg" and copied that in the album folder

By then all album covers were shown in Twonky and after rebuilding the database on the Moment they were shown as well. 

Fix artist art / covers

Quite a lot of local artist have no artist art. I have not figured out how to solve this; they are most likely not in the Deezer database

At one point no artist covers were shown at all. I tried resetting the Moment, Rebuilding the database, nothing worked. 

Restarting Twonky did not help either. I disabled all "media receivers", rebooted everything and then finally all artist covers were shown. 

Note: all this might sound relatively straightforward and in the end it was, but it did take me quite some time, resetting rebooting of Moment / Mac Mini / Twonky etc. In the process I also tried Firestream DLNA which is a new DLNA server you can buy in the Itunes app store. It is actually easier to use than Twonky and you can als immediately connect to the Itunes library. The reason I am not using it is that it album art seems to be downgraded to a much lower resolution and even with Firestream not all album art was shown (but much more than initially with Twonky). All in all it took me a full week to get everything right (working on it almost all evenings). 

Performance

Sound: excellent both Deezer, Tunein and DLNA. I also like it that I can fine tune sound with bass / treble / tilt / loudness settings

(physical) Design: I ike it a lot (both sides, but especially the wooden) , but of course this is personal.

(software) Design: Beautiful, clean, modern, useful. Also like the vague edges of album & artist art (in most cases), Deezer artist art looks really nice. 

Statbility: excellent, no drop outs despite working with Wifi. Huge difference compared to Airplay streaming I used before

Moodwheel. One of the reasons why I bought the Moment in the first place. Inner ring works great and lets you rediscover your own music library. It plays songs you would usually not listen to, but will in the context of a certain mood. I find the music really matches the moods with very little exceptions. Middle ring is a bit of a hit and miss. The songs still matches the moods, but some songs are so far off to my taste that I have to skip / dislike quite a few of them. Hopefully this gets better in the future as the Moment learns my taste. Also relatively little own music is played. Outer ring, Also a hit and miss; quite a few songs that match the moods but not within my favorites genres / musical taste. Note: I found

Facel wrote:

Apart for a MP3 transcoding done on the Synology, I do not see any reason why the Audio quality should be lower on a Synology NAs

 

I didn't have audio transcoding active on the Synology as the Moment is able to read all the formats I have in my library, no need to use CPU for nothing, specially on a DS212j that does not have so much horse power deliver.

I understand your comments, I asked myself the same question, and I'm just sharing my initial and current feeling: after almost 7 months using the Synology as my DLNA source for the moment, my hears were caught by the sound difference once I moved to the QNAP and this was NOT what I was expecting initially in this NAS upgrade.

Could also be the latest Moment upgrade that happened at the same time, but I doubt it is the case.

Hi Peter

Thanks for your elaborate summary. Quick question, I also keep having problems with album art, artist despite the fact that I manually checked and sometimes changed all artwork in iTunes metadata before copying the library to my NAS (Synology 214+, which is working quite well).

I will certainly also try your solution. Did your solution also solve missing artist/album art in the Beoapp?

Best, Joost

JoostdenEngelsman wrote:

I also keep having problems with album art, artist despite the fact that I manually checked and sometimes changed all artwork in iTunes metadata before copying the library to my NAS (Synology 214+, which is working quite well)

Best, Joost

Joost - I had the Synology running as DLNA source for many months and I never managed to have a satisfying album cover rendering.

Either there was no cover while the Media Station was showing one, either there was the cover of another album.
To attempt to fix it, my first step was to make sure that Audio Station was displaying covers, which is not always the case even if covers are shown in iTunes, then I have leveraged Metadatics, an OSX tool, to set or reset the album covers, then I was launching Audio Station to make sure there were displayed, then refreshing or rebuilding the Moment database to try to have them displayed, with no warranty.
With more than 2200 album in my library, I gave up playing this painful game and my ticket with BeoCare on the topic never got answered with satisfying solutions.

My move to QNAP + Twonky drastically improved the situation.

Cheers

JoostdenEngelsman wrote:

Hi Peter

Thanks for your elaborate summary. Quick question, I also keep having problems with album art, artist despite the fact that I manually checked and sometimes changed all artwork in iTunes metadata before copying the library to my NAS (Synology 214+, which is working quite well).

I will certainly also try your solution. Did your solution also solve missing artist/album art in the Beoapp?

 

Best, Joost

In my experience, the fact that album art shows in Itunes does not necessarily lead to a satisfactory display in Twonky. 

However, if album art is shown in Twonky it displays correctly on the Moment,

As said, I got 80% album art by embedding album art with a tool called "Tage Editor" and the other 20% by copying album jpg in the correct album folder and rename it to folder.jpg (so not the actual name of the folder, but just call them all folder.jpg and put them in the right folders).

This lead to 100% album cover display; on Twonky, Moment and the BeoPlay app. Of course it could be that just copying folder.jpg is suffice; I have not tested that.

In rare cases a folder.jpg does not display in Twonky but then you just have to try another one you can find; probably has to do with the format / resolution of the file. 

Of course this is all with Twonky / Mac combination, so not 100% sure it will work in your set up. 

Hope this helps. 

Peter

Thanks. As you noted I'm not using Twonky but the Synology music server. Some art is shown but most isn't. I will try using the folder.jpeg solution and see whether it works.

PeterBOBP wrote:

Fix artist art / covers

Quite a lot of local artist have no artist art. I have not figured out how to solve this; they are most likely not in the Deezer database

At one point no artist covers were shown at all. I tried resetting the Moment, Rebuilding the database, nothing worked. 

Restarting Twonky did not help either. I disabled all "media receivers", rebooted everything and then finally all artist covers were shown. 

Thanks of your elaborate post. I share many of your findings and also share your view on wishlist.

Regarding Artist art, this is served by Gracenote so you are not able to influence that content. (Other than making sure you spell the artist name correct)

Hiort wrote:

Regarding Artist art, this is served by Gracenote so you are not able to influence that content. (Other than making sure you spell the artist name correct)

I do not agree with you . You should be able to embeeded the Album covert (Artist Art) into the audio file in this case you swill  be independant  from 

Gracenote or any other similar stuff.

Facel wrote:

I do not agree with you . You should be able to embeeded the Album covert (Artist Art) into the audio file in this case you swill be independant from

Gracenote or any other similar stuff.