Linn Forums

Update: This is now fixed (see post 10) and thanks very much to Davidd and Audiokaas for helping and bouncing ideas about!

Bri

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Hi

I have tried this with the Twonky music tree set with album names ‘ABC’ field set to 2. This shows a sub-menu as AB, CD, EF etc and permits faster navigation on the standard Linn GUI.

With Kinsky PDA, AB and CD have no album art; simply a list of names (in list format). EF and GH have most of the artwork. IJ, KL, MN, OP simply don’t work (Kinsky sits with the rotating timer logo centre screen). QR shows albums with art. ST shows in list format. UV and WX show most art (as with EF and GH). YZ doesn’t work; it just shows the timer logo centre screen.

Selecting any of the above sub-menu selections which show just the timer sometimes completely locks Kinsky. I can sometimes get back to the root of the library but other times Kinsky either crashes, or I have to reset the PDA using the reset switch.

Setting the ‘ABC’ field to show all (no number) shows just a list format (no art at all).

Setting the ‘ABC’ field to ‘1’ works for A~L but ‘I’ locks up Kinsky as per ‘IJ’ described under the settings for ABC=2 above. Same with 'K' and probably more but I'm just going to give up for now.

Is this something specific to do with my setup (NV+, TM4.4.9, KDS/KK) or is Kinsky PDA known to be faulty in this area? As it stands, it is completely useable.

Bri

Hi Bri,

Album art work is only shown in album containers with fewer than a hundred albums. This will be the reason why some of your alphabetically indexed folders show album art and some show plain lists. You will have to play with the number of letters per folder to get them to all show album art. If you browse via artist do you still experience the same behaviour?

If you are getting partial art work, i.e. you get albums without the no album art image, this is indicative of Twonky saying there is art work available, but not serving the art work. Twonky has issue with serving art work if the file system path to the art work contains special characters, such as &'s, etc.

What version of KinskyPDA are you using?

David

Hi David

I tried 1.0.7 (but had a job clearing the playlist) then tried 1.0.6. Thanks for the info about the 100 limit, but this doesn't explain why setting the ABC field to 1 locks Kinsky up when selecting 'I' or 'K' (and no doubt more; I'll find out later but have to rush out right now). Any thoughts?

Bri

I love 1.0.7... Now if david would just fix the fontsize...

Clearing the playlist is simpler than ever, just tab and hold the screen while in playlist mode (on now playing tab now playing to get there)and the menu let's you do all.

ROM update your pda, the wireless connection is much better.

Check your folders for large Folder.jpg files, they might be the culprit.

Rebuild the twonky database, mine was halved in size after the rebuild and much more responsive...


good luck

Hi

I tried rebuilding the database and tried reverting to TM 4.4.6 (rebuilding the database again) but still had the problems. I put TM 4.4.9 back on last night, rebuilt the database and I'll try 1.0.7 again today. I'll then check that there are no large jpg's in the alphabetical categories which lock it up.

Interestingly, TM 4.4.6 showed slightly more artwork than 4.4.9 does. I wondered if Kinsky / PDA simply cannot handle the quantity of albums under the alphabetical categories 'I' 'K' etc but that's not it as there are more under the categories which do actually work.

I think I'll have to investigate Mediatomb sometime but am reluctant to spend lots of time loading it up only to find it presents yet another set of problems; it'd be good to find someonw who has it working.

I guess I'm just spoiled by SqueezeCentre which works flawlessly with the albums/artwork I currently have on my NAS. I'll let you know how I get on with my investigations.

Bri

Hi

Thanks fore that, I was looking for the bin icon as per 1.0.6 but it seems that has been completely dropped from 1.0.7.

Two ideas to improve Kinsky:
I'd quite like an option to empty the entire playlist from the 'now playing' artwork screen; just as an additional line added to the existing menu items.

I'd like the volume controls to remain on screen all the time.

Album browse fault update:
Think I understand what's wrong with the Album selection. If you browse albums under A, then B, then C, by the time you have got to D, it just gives up. If you go directly to D then it works OK so it looks like it's either Twonky being unable to handle it, or more likely it's Kinsky running out of memory. Maybe Kinsky isn't able to 'forget' the last selections in order to load up the new selection?

Bri

You could be right. Kinsky seems to do some sort of caching as it is much quicker second time around. I have never seen the problem you experience though. How many items are there in let's say I ?

Have you loaded kinsky in mainmemory?
How many running prgrams are there? (settings -> memory -> active programs?
activesync is easily disabled this way...

# Activesync (Start, Programs, activesync)
# Add Server Source.
# Server adres 1.1.1.1 next.
# username abc , password 123 domain abc. next.
# Bottom right Finish.
# Choose Schedule
# Peak times & Off-peak times = Manually. OK

If you let the readynas reboot and scan for errors does it find anything?

Again in my setup zero problems. even the resume after hibernation of the Ipaq works 80% of the time.

Maybe I should add more albums to try and find the problem

Hi

Answered a few points in red but not sure what you mean about the server store. From the ActiveSync on the main PC, you can add an exchange server store location but obviously that's not what you mean. I can't see any ActiveSync options under the PDA programmes.

I've just extracted the album art from about 14450 tracks and created 'folder.jpg' in each directory (dBpoweramp batch converter is fantastic). I still cannot see all so I've just removed the embedded are from some and am rebuilding the database. If successful, I can use Mp3tag to remove all embedded art in one shot. I'll let you know how it goes.

Incidentally, although dBpoweramp indicated it would save them all as Folder.jpg, they are all saved as folder.jpg. I will just have to see if Twonky recognises the lower case version.

Bri

I think my top direcory has 16 albums with art, I'll try the 1 setting aat 2 and let you know

If you do not have active sync on your system or rather it's not activated (it's part of windows mobile classic)
then you probably do not have the problem of having it wake up every 5 minutes to synchronize even though there is no direct link.

If you had the "wake-up-drained-battery-hosed-kinskyPda" problem you would have had a solution.

Good luck on trying to sort out the database.

In twonky you could also make a little test directory and have that scanned whilst you unmark your real directory, it's what I did trying to figure it all out. There is 9916 tracks in my Twonky database + 9000 or so photo's as well as 243 video's.

Why your Twonky does not want to play, I don't know, I'm out of obvious options...

Hi

Twonky is the rudest and most heavily used swear word in my vocabulary! That said, I've got it running very well now and am totally delighted with the results as displayed on Kinsky PDA 1.0.7

I've removed the symbols from the album paths (which took many hours) and now have most of the album art showing. It's interesting to see how sensitive Twonky actually is; it does see paths with brackets and hyphens but not much else. It even fails with apostrophes anywhere in the directory name and there are a surprising amount of them once you start looking (like B52's and clubber's etc etc)!

It seems to be OK with me having embedded art as well as floder.jpg, but as you say, you cannot have other jpg's in the same directory. I still have a few aren't displaying and have not worked out what’s wrong yet. It can only be that Twonky’s having problems with the path name; I'll just have to experiment and find out how to fix them.

Now that I've extracted all the art into jpg's, 1.0.7 it's really working really fabulously well. It looks like it was Twonkys handling of embedded art which was somehow causing the Kinsky lock-up problems; I simply cannot get it to lock up now that I've renamed some of the paths and created the separate jpg's.

Fantastic!

Bri