Linn Forums

Hmm,

I've downloaded, installed and played around with KinskyPDA last night.

It's still Beta in the sense that it frequently freezes, looses connection with the DS. and looks could be improved... Some comments then in random order.

1. It would be nice if the albumart on now playing was bigger and showed some how the previous and next on either side, Big in the middle small on the side?
2. Going from now playing to playlist is a pain to many clicks...
3. Opening today results in top bar covering Kinsky
4. In library and playlist view the font size and line spacing is way to big, bring it back to the size of the nowplaying (without the Bold) and
   it would be fine.
5. Or make it dependent on the chosen font size in "screen settings" that way even the 40+ people without glasses can keep living the myth(i'm one)
6. Album art in library view is too small, either make it bigger and at the same time reduce fontsize or leave it, reduce fontsize and make it 3 columns...
7. Twonky is not found when the router was previously rebooted. my boo?
8. After shutting down PDA and reactivating sometimes there is no connection to DS or library, everytime though a linn icon appears in the top bar, leading to 4 or 5 linn icons, if it hasn't frozen up first.
9. The add album/song buttons are not intuitive and ugly.
10. In artistview the twonky -ALL- catagory pics up the first album cover.
11. Some albumart is not shown, presumably because they are too big, what are the max min sizes in pixels.
12. there seems too be no caching of albumart?
    

Top gripes:

• Album view; the album art is too small and the font too big. just fill the screen with art and leave out the text or reduce the fontsize. Better yet make text/ number of columns an option...
• Volume up/down usually onlly works once if at all.
  

Just some thoughts
I do not like the 214 much, a bit clumsy, I love it as a "small" remote that stays on.
Volume up/down usually only works once if at all.

Keep up the good work do it does seem to go forward in the right direction.
PS how about las fm for PDA.....

Hi,

Album Art is an interesting one. Although I don't know about the specifics of KinskyPDA I do know the following:

The AlbumArt returned via UPnP is scaled BY THE MEDIA SERVER (Twonky etc) to 160x160px so no matter how big your Folder.jpg file is you won't see anything bigger than that.

AlbumArt is VERY buggy on Twonky. I have multipule tracks in the same folder (So same Folder.jpg). Twonky will sometimes (reproducably) return a faulty URL for specific tracks, and correct URL for others.

So for this I don't think KinskyPDA is to blame.

Rik

160*160 That's perfect then no rescaling required for the 3 column layout, using that glorious 640*480 screen, let's have it then....

This would thus also be a problem for the Itouch applications...

Twonky seems to become and orphan by neglect....
No fixes for the obvious bugs in the last 6 months, no new beta for 6 months, no more user installable NAS editions

In spite of the long list of potential alternatives none really fit the bill for the NAS's, very very worrisome.

The long wait starts now?

Hi

Ideas
First, to add to the list of ideas, here are some thoughts to help with GUI layout:

1. Keep the volume buttons permanently enabled; there’s no reason why they should disappear as there’s space for them.
2. A 'Start here' facility (for things selecting track 20~30 from a triple album set of 30 tracks; what would have been CD3 in old money). This would be a really useful function!
3. Stop the artwork exception from crashing Kinsky
4. Force it to ‘page’ down when browsing albums such that a complete set of 4 albums (and text) are shown on screen.
5. Maybe the bottom of the navigation keys would be ideal for page down (it already does this) but it would be nice if it didn’t ‘highlight’ the album picture as this spoils the browsing experience. Maybe one of the assignable buttons could be made to page down without highlignting?


Problems
Currently, Twonky (and thus KinskyPDA) simply doesn't work with my collection. I tried my best by manually resizing all my folder.jpg's to 160x160 and removing all embedded artwork. I then found that there were several albums which only work with embedded art; for these, I had to embed the art and remove the folder.jpg.

I then combined many double and triple albums into single albums in order to get myself below the 100 limit for album names beginning with a given letter (my Twonky music tree album name ABC=1). This is not ideal as they now contain 40~60 tracks and make it a real hassle to select CD2 or CD3.

Having done all that, I've managed to get the most popular category (albums beginning with 'S') down to 97 but cannot see the art for the last 10 on the list (these show correctly when you look under artist or play the album so they are not actually 'broken'). I think Twonky is 'stalling' part way through sending art for larger lists, and this is what's upsetting Kinsky. I've just managed (for the first time) to load all albums beginning with 'S'; there are currently 97 of them but it normally all stops at about 85 or less. Oddly, this full 'S' listing is now repeatable (even after a Kinsky restart) so maybe Twonky is caching this somewhere on the NAS?

I found that having now got art working, Kinsky crashes (exception error) if you try to browse albums. This is not just 'S' albums, but after browsing A, then B, then C, it happens at D (each contain about 80 albums). I wonder if this is tied up with the 'S' situation and that there's a Twonky NAS cache being attempted?

Incidentally, I'm now finding that the web interface in Twonky is playing up: selecting a letter (say 'C') sometimes offers me the option to download C.m3u instead of showing the list of albums beginning with C. This hever happened before and I guess must be something to do with Twonky now trying to deal with folder.jpg and not embedded art now?

I'm going to back up my NAS, embed all the art again, and then try deleting all the folder.jpg's on the drive, just to see if it works.

I should probably add that my collection is about 9000 tracks in the normal container and 4500 in the compilation container. This probably makes my collection a bit different to many and might have a bearing on things being so tricky, but thus far, I have spent days and days retagging hundreds of albums, resizing images, renaming paths and my conclusion is that that Twonky simply doesn’t work very well. It’s all working fine if you go via the Artist route, but the whole attraction was to be able to browse albums pictorially; this being the only route to browsing albums in the compilation container (since they do not appear in the artist listing).

I’m going to have to figure out how to install Media Tomb on my NAS and see if it works any better; does anybody know if Media Tomb can handle a seperate container for compilations?

Incidentally, I noticed that even after combining my multi-disk sets, my Duet still sees them as multi-album sets – I’d forgotten about the inability of Twonky to recognise multi disk-sets. Amusingly, this actually helps Twonky as it keeps the (now combined) overall album count low (and thus below the 100 album limit) whilst letting Slimserver show the albums correctly split into different disks (as before).

It's a shame about the Twonky issues as the concept and look of Kinsky are fabulous! The 100 album limit almost kills it for me anyway as I'm almost at that now; and that's after combining double albums! I'd still really like to get it working though. If not, anyone want to buy a (very nearly) new PDA?

Bri

You do have a unique problem with your compilations it would seem.

From the hip...

Compilation show up in artist various. you could subtype that by album?
Genre works.
So you could have the selection
Genre-Artist-Album

resulting in a dual tree of rest and compilations as the first node, if you retag the genre tag in those 2 or more categories...

Also I find map a good node to start with I use that for all things classical.

You probably thought of these though, then again maybe not

Hi

Hmm, I could assign genre's of the compilation albums to be the first letter of the album name; this could also be a way round the 100 album art limit. Say I had more than 100 C's, I could assign some as having genre's Ca~Cl and the rest as Cn~Cz. Chilled Ibeza would have genre Ca~Cl and Cyclotron would have genre Cn~Cz.

NB I see that after a rebuild, Twonky has just 'lost' art for an album it was displaying only this morning. It's odd as nothing has been changed and it's also vanished from the web page view as well. I wish that Packet Racket would actually do something about Twonky; it really is a load of rubbish in its current state but could be so very good if fixed.

If I'm doing DIY and hit my thumb with a hammer, I now shout 'Oh Twonky!' At least the neighbours don't think I'm swearing; but I sure am!!

Bri