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[Kduff999]

Finally got our music system stabilized for reliable operation and thought I'd share a few notes in case useful for others. This is a wired DLNA system with MC 20 running on a MiniMac and music stored on a Synology DS214Play NAS. All files are FLAC with a mix of CD and HD resolutions. Three rooms use NAD 7050 and three rooms use Cambridge Audio StreamMagic6 for rendering. The three rooms with CA boxes also have TV's connected via Ethernet. One of the NAD's is connected to the MiniMac via USB (using the NAD driver), while the others are connected via Ethernet. Remote control is via Gizmo on an Android phone and JRemote on iPhone and iPad. Remote equipment control is via RTI from the iPhone and iPad (I still can't get the Android phone to reliably connect to RTI).

1. Application Conflicts: One of the first things we had to do was deconflict multiple applications trying to play the same role (e.g. DLNA server). These have been widely addressed elsewhere in this forum so I'll skip the details here.

2. Auto-Start: We had MC being auto-started twice and two copies running conflicted with each other. This problem was also solved through help from this forum.

3. Power Saving Features: I ended up turning these off for the Synology DS214Play NAS, MiniMac, and Dell Monitor. Seemed to have problems occasionally when components went to sleep. Maybe out-of-sequence wake ups among components causing problems.The power amps still sleep, but these don't seem to interfere with operations.

4. TV and Music Networking: Organizing the TV Ethernet connections onto one Switch and running music through another helped improve reliability. Even with a Gigabit LAN and good NetGear switches, we were experiencing loading issues when multiple rooms ran concurrently. The networking aspects are well beyond my comprehension - recommend hiring a good professional. One issues was that the AT7T U-verse guy would come and change things around to optimize performance for TV's, then my networking guy would have to change it back to balance network performance for TV and music systems.

5. DLNA Controller Settings: The NAD and CA renderers each require different DLNA Controller Option settings within MC. I disabled SetNext Support for all rooms (on advice from this forum). For the NAD 7050 rooms, I also set MC to "Ignore Transport Events". The combination of these two settings solved a strange problem with the NAD's where the first song would play fine, then every subsequent song would be highly distorted. This configuration of DLNA Controller Settings was also recommended by the engineers at NAD. However, turning on Ignore Transport Events broke the CA StreamMagic6 renderers.  They would stop playing after one song. So I had to turn it off for those rooms.

6. Remote Control Connections: While the music components are connected via wired Ethernet, the handheld remotes (iPhone, iPad, Android) are connected via WiFi. There are multiple WiFi access points throughout the house to get good signal strength throughout. We had several problems with handoffs among access points as we moved around the house controlling music in different rooms. Upgraded the WiFi system to one that has built-in handoff features among access points, which helped. Still have a few problems with this, but most of the time it can be fixed by manually forcing the handheld to remote to reconnect to MC. The iPhone still gets confused sometimes trying to reconnect to the old PC that had MC on it before I switched to the MiniMac. May need to reinstall JRemote to make it forget the old PC.

Thanks for all the help from this forum.
Keith
 

[Arindelle]

Thank you Keith for the post! (The ONLY positive, constructive one I have read today for some reason -- so thanks really)

There might be ways to streamline this for future users ! Its always going to be a bit problematic with multiple DLNA devices (why JRiver renderers are all I've got ).

Maybe you can use a couple of zoneswitch rules and add a couple of extra zones would help with the rooms you turned "off". Who knows (No5)

You probably could just delete and reenter the server from JRemote? (No. 6) Again wake on lan over wireless can be tricky -- if you can wake the machine running media server, it should get in line.

For your power savings, I'd keep the NAS on all of the time, but maybe you or your network guy could look into WoL --, with  ethernet connections fed to switches it should be feasible. [I've had better luck with TeamViewer waking up things that refuse WoL than JRemote, you can put it on an ipad or iphone -- its free if you want to try it.]


I'm clueless with Macs though 

Anyways congrats, not an easy set-up!

[Kduff999]

Arindelle,

Thanks for your reply. One potential clarification. For my comment #5, I just turned off the "Ignore Transport Events" setting in MC for the rooms with CA StreamMagic6 renderers. Those rooms are working great.

I have TeamViewer downloaded and will play around with it.

Cheers,
Keith

[jimrealty]

Where are the settings for the items listed in Item 5.  I have a NAD D 7050 and I am having the same problem with the 2nd song being distorted. I am looking under the Media Networks and can't find anything with these settings.

Thanks
Jim

5. DLNA Controller Settings: The NAD and CA renderers each require different DLNA Controller Option settings within MC. I disabled SetNext Support for all rooms (on advice from this forum). For the NAD 7050 rooms, I also set MC to "Ignore Transport Events". The combination of these two settings solved a strange problem with the NAD's where the first song would play fine, then every subsequent song would be highly distorted. This configuration of DLNA Controller Settings was also recommended by the engineers at NAD. However, turning on Ignore Transport Events broke the CA StreamMagic6 renderers.  They would stop playing after one song. So I had to turn it off for those rooms.

[jimrealty]

Just found it.