nStream wish: Display of track times (nStream compared to BubbleUPnP)

After using the android BubbleUPnP app on a Nexus 5 against a BubbleUPnP-Server as proxy in front of my uniti 1 I now have spend a lot of money for an iPad mini 2 to be able to use the N-Stream app. To be honest, I like the Bubble-way much more yet. The new version of the Bubble-app has been polished recently and is much better usable than before. The navigation is so much quicker than with the n-Stream app. But ok, maybe it is just a question of getting familiar to iOS and the N-Stream app.

The feature that I am missing most is the info of track times in the library and the playlist. Very often I have different versions of a track and decide which one to play be checking the track time. Or I just remember that the one really good track of an album is the longest one but cannot remember the track name. Without the track time it often is more difficult to find the right track. Did I miss a setting to turn this info on?

Also I am missing the function to search for tracks/albums/artists (UPnP search) over the whole server. Can this be found somewhere in N-Stream? (Not to mention the random tracks functionality of BubbleUPnP. As long as the server offers the UPnP search functionality, too, like minimserver on my Synology DS213+)

A big drawback of iOS is that it does not support multi user profiles. As I want it to be the living room tablet for everybody in the house including guests, mainly for controlling the uniti, but also to check a web page quickly, I cannot configure mails, messengers, etc. for my personal accounts. So it feels like a dead end if you find an interesting web page and want to send it somewhere (e.g. to read on at a PC, etc.)

The cover art function of the n-Stream app is not that smart. Very often the wrong album and cover is chosen and you cannot find the right one in the offered list. Also I am disappointed that no lyrics are displayed there (or did I overlook something)?

The reasons why I wanted to give NStream a try were:

- Be sure that playback works really robust. With the Bubble-App/Server combination the playback order was disrupted sometimes. The most recent version of the app fixes an reorder bug with openhome clients, so maybe this issue is gone now. But I wanted to be sure that I do not need to think about such problems anymore. Unfortunately yesterday the uniti did not play gaplessly anymore when using the nStream app. I have to check if this problem still occurs after turning everything off and on again. Does anybody have found such an issue, too?

- In-track navigation (fast forward/backward in a track) was a feature that I have missed very often. Unfortunately N-Stream does not offer this with all track formats. Also it sometimes takes some seconds until the new position is found and playback starts there. I think the whole UPnP-stuff is not working really perfectly for music listening. Maybe using a small HTPC (raspberry pi with digital out sound card?) and mpd using NFS would be the better way to go?

- I first was shocked that playback from the minimserver (that has a much better cover art handling than the Synology media server) did not work. There were two things that made a problem: First transcoding the music to L24 (lpcm 24 bit) did not work with nstream. You have to use wav24 instead. But this will be fixed with a next version of minimserver as Simon (the minimserver developer) answered me in the forum. The second thing is that you have to turn off the extraInfo-Property of the minimserver. If this is turned on, n-Stream does not offer the play/enqueue buttons for a whole folder. Is this a known problem? Is this a bug in n-Stream? Should I report it to naim?

So far my first expressions with N-Stream. I hope I get used to it a little bit more. An improved version of n-Stream would be nice. Also an android version still would be very welcomed.

Greetings

Gert