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Author Topic: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums  (Read 1166 times)

JFan#999

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JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« on: March 11, 2023, 04:12:55 am »

Hi Forum

I am using JRiver MediaCenter 30.0.59 and JRemote2 2.3.1 on Android. JRemote2 I use at home on the sofa as a remote control for MC 30 on desktop. Unfortunately, JRemote2 started to become very unresponsive, meaning for too many albums the tracks are no longer displayed on my smartphone. In the upper left part of the app the album cover is shown and next to the album artist, but below there is only a blue circle running for ages.

Note that this odd behavior equally applied to MC 29.

Any advise pls?

Many thanks,
Bernd
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JFan#999

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #1 on: March 11, 2023, 05:50:04 am »

Reinstalling JRemote2 did not resolve the issue.
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JFan#999

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #2 on: March 19, 2023, 12:05:40 pm »

Ok, when leveraging the Album view some Album X cannot be played at all (as JRemote2 keeps searching forever), but for a subset of Albums that share this behavior individual tracks can be played via the composer view. This is pretty odd.

In my view, JRemote2 is a highly unstable!
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JimH

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #3 on: March 19, 2023, 12:10:35 pm »

Are the files tagged correctly?  (Album not blank?)
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JFan#999

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #4 on: March 24, 2023, 04:37:12 pm »

Hi JimH

Yes, all my files are correctly tagged. No idea how to resolve this issue. It is pretty annoying.

Bernd
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markf2748

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2023, 01:25:33 pm »

In my view, JRemote2 is a highly unstable!
More likely it is something else about your system.  Try another app:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,135295.msg937497.html#msg937497
to see if same issue recurs.

Grasping at system straws:

Are your music files stored local to the MC server or on a NAS?  If latter, is NAS access reliable?

Is it always the same albums which exhibit the issue?

Do you have multiple source drives for your albums, whereby some drive(s) work consistently and others are problematic?

I assume MC 30 on your desktop is running an instance of MC server in order to make itself a visible DLNA zone on the network.  Does the server remain visible on the network when you encounter this issue (look at available zones in JRemote2 for instance, or another app)?  If server communication is lost you may see that blue circle spin forever.

Are there multiple MC servers in your network? If so, try reducing it to one, just as an experiment.

Are Storage and Memory usage for JRemote2 on your phone reasonable when this happens, as shown in the Android App info?  Try clearing the JRemote2 app cache.
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JFan#999

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #6 on: April 15, 2023, 05:16:50 am »

Thanks markf2748 for your valuable hints

Installed Gizmo, and tested if the issues remains: There is no issue when using Gizmo, each and every track is displayed and can be played!

To answer your questions:

1) "Are your music files stored local to the MC server or on a NAS?"
All my music files are stored on a local SSD drive, which is even separate from the main drive that hosts Win11

2) "Is it always the same albums which exhibit the issue?"
Correct it is always the same subset on albums, I believe. When I add new albums, some are affected others not.

3) "Do you have multiple source drives for your albums, whereby some drive(s) work consistently and others are problematic?"
Actually, until this week my albums were spread across 2 different SSD drives. However, after reading your post I moved all my albums on a single separate SSD drive, which is separate from the main drive hosting Win11. However, even before moving my albums onto a single SSD drive both drives worked just fine, never experienced an issue.

4) "I assume MC 30 on your desktop is running an instance of MC server in order to make itself a visible DLNA zone on the network."
I believe this is the case. Under JRemote2 --> "My servers" There is only a single server listed.

"Does the server remain visible on the network when you encounter this issue (look at available zones in JRemote2 for instance, or another app)?"
Sorry, no idea how I could check this. Any advice pls?

"If server communication is lost you may see that blue circle spin forever."
Noted

5) "Are there multiple MC servers in your network? If so, try reducing it to one, just as an experiment."
Under JRemote2 --> "My servers" There is only a single server listed.

6) "Are Storage and Memory usage for JRemote2 on your phone reasonable when this happens, as shown in the Android App info?  Try clearing the JRemote2 app cache."
My Smartphone is only 2 yrs old and I never run into performance/memory issues. Did clear the JRemote2 cache, but issue remains.

Thanks again,
Bernd
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markf2748

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #7 on: April 16, 2023, 12:46:40 pm »

Installed Gizmo, and tested if the issues remains: There is no issue when using Gizmo, each and every track is displayed and can be played!

2) "Is it always the same albums which exhibit the issue?"
Correct it is always the same subset on albums, I believe. When I add new albums, some are affected others not.

4) ... "Does the server remain visible on the network when you encounter this issue (look at available zones in JRemote2 for instance, or another app)?"
Sorry, no idea how I could check this. Any advice pls?
Your extensive testing has eliminated a lot of possible gremlins.  Further suggestions:

Re 2):  If it is truly repeatable, leverage that by picking one specific album and take a really close look at its file format, bit rate, and especially the tags.  My impression from earlier posts is that you probably are dealing with a lot of classical albums, which can be very tricky to tag:

A) Do your tags have special characters in them (umlauts, accents, non-English letters, etc.), which may mislead JRemote2 whereas Gizmo is more robust in this regard?  If so, try removing them and see if that fixes things.

B) It is a known issue that invisible characters sometimes creep into MC tags, particularly album names.  I have been frustrated by this multiple times. Hard to detect.  A comparison "cross check" smartlist can be revealing if in your organization the album name and folder name are supposed to be identical, but turn out not so.  If suspected, I totally delete the album name (or other questionable tag) and re-enter it manually.  More often than not, voila, the issue vanishes.

C) Is your audio file structure relatively straightforward (for example Artist > Album > Tracks), or more complex as may be the case for classical music?  Are you mixing classical and "non-classical" which have different important tags filled out or empty, and your exceptions always fall into just one of these categories?  I think some users have a dedicated file structure for classical only.

Re 4):  Since you report that Gizmo works, I think you have eliminated most server issues.  Some long shots:

D) You can check if the server is "lost", i.e. not communicating with JRemote2 only, or entirely down, by firing up Gizmo on your phone and looking at its server list when JRemote2 is spinning its wheel.  Even try shutting down JRemote2 and immediately try to play same album on Gizmo.

E) If JRemote2 <--> MC Server network communications are suspect, play around with settings in "DLNA Controller Options" (RMB menu for your target device in Playing Now).  At the moment, I have the last three out of the four checked for my particular system.  If you have multiple player zones, does same issue arise in every zone?

F) If you initiate playing a troublesome album directly on the server, does JRemote2 correctly "monitor" the tracklist and currently playing track under its Player "Player" zone?  Normally this should happen.   
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JFan#999

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Re: JRemote2 for Android not responding for too many albums
« Reply #8 on: April 16, 2023, 03:14:44 pm »

Thanks again.

Your impression is correct, my library holds approx. 95% of classical music. Guess, I developed a sophisticated tagging system. But this is actually why I opted for JRiver.

A) I will particularly check for umlauts, accents, non-English letters in the tags, particularly in the albums causing trouble. However, I would expect that JRemote2 is at least as robust as the free Gizmo in this respect. If it is really due to umlauts or accents I will simply stop using JRemote2.

B) Album tag and folder name differ completely in my setup. However, the name tag and the file name are almost identical: Whenever I finished tagging an album I use the library tools to copy the name tag as file name in bulk (really like this MC feature!). Additionally, I add the track number in front of the file name to ensure that tracks are sorted in case some player does not sort by track number tag.

C) My file structure differs by Genre. For Classical music it is: Classical > First Letter of Composer Surname > Composer Surname > Album Folder Name (which follows its own dedicated structure) > Tracks. Yes, all the albums causing trouble fall into the Classical genre. There is no Pop or Jazz album causing trouble though a lot of the custom fields for classical music are not populated.

Will get back to you, but it may take some time. Luckily, Gizmo works just fine ;D
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