At the risk of exposing a slightly sacrilegious mixing of the big names.... I've been using Kazoo Server with Naim endpoints, mostly because I haven't fully weaned myself off iTunes for library/mobile device management. Kazoo Server has a pretty good iTunes library processing engine, and presents it in the Naim app very nicely.
However, I'm struggling to get audio to play with a new Uniti Atom. The problem, however, is a bit weird.
Things that work:
1. Kazoo Server Library browsing in Naim control point app
2. Playing Media App tracks exposed via Kazoo server, e.g. using the BBC app. These get queued correctly on the Atom, render album art and play fine.
Things that don't work:
1. Correctly getting the Atom to render anything from the iTunes library - almost everything is ALAC (which I thought might cause problems) but the same is true of mp3 podcasts.
The symptoms are that the Naim control point app instructs the Atom to play, and the display changes to the music notes (i.e. album art not displayed). Very occasionally the album art renders - but presume this is a timing/race condition issue somewhere. After about 30 seconds of silence the Atom tends to time-out and give up on any attempt to play the track, returning to the home screen.
Thinking there might be some broken compatibility between Linn's Openhome implementation vs standard UPNP I tried using Bubbleupbpsever to create a clean proxy. This behaves in an absolutely identical way to the above.
It's really puzzling that it's only 'local' media that isn't rendering, but remote media is fine.
Is anyone else running this setup and able to offer some debugging advice?
Thanks!
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by Adam Zielinski
This seems to suggest that the iTunes library is not really working correctly / has not been set up correctly e.g. has 'home sharing' been enabled on it?
But in a way - that is irrelevant - I would strongly suggest that you rebuild your library on a NAS (it;s not clear from your post where it resides now) and with new music start using WAV or AIFF files.
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by davidbath
Hi Adam! Thanks for the message and for the suggestions.
I should have been clear - it's not an iTunes problem; firstly, home sharing has nothing to do with this - Kazoo server simply uses the itunes xml for metadata and reads the content files directly. There's actually no strong itunes dependency at all, it's simply that kazoo server does a good job of processing itunes metadata (including playlists). Kazoo Server also has an inbuilt file scanning library, and the behaviour using this is identical - i.e. that it serves up the file list perfectly, but the renderer fails to play it.
On your advice about wav - there's simply no advantage to using wav in my mind, and only a lot of disadvantages as the container doesn't allow for metadata storage. Any credible lossless format that supports metadata is more useful.
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by Adam Zielinski
But WAV has no problems supporting metadata - it was designed to do so. But many times I've seen metadata wrongly applied.
AIFF files seem more 'robust'.
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by davidbath
All good - everyone has their preference for file formats, and constraints around which devices/cloud services/software they regularly interact with. The long of the short of it is that it doesn't appear relevant to this bit of debugging, as I get the same behaviour with mp3s being served in this manner.
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by Mike-B
To confirm the metadata question with WAV. The original WAV specification published in 1991 defined an INFO List Chunk that can contain information about the file such as Title, Artist & Genre. WAV files can embed any kind of metadata including the popular ID3 tags & XMP. However "officially" WAV does not support embedding metadata &some applications may not be set up to process the extra information; this is maybe where this WAV metadata rumour may come from. But be assured I edit & manipulate WAV without any problems whatsoever using dBpoweramp & MP3tag software, & all my music is WAV (+ a few DSD)
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by davidbath
[@mention:1566878603907884] - yes you're totally correct about that. And again, that's mostly preference and the choices different software vendors (especially those I happen to interact with) have made in whether they honour or ignore extra information and therefore whether it feels a reliable common standard in my environment. As far as it goes, notwithstanding the metadata point, I don't personally see any useful advantages in wav vs a sensible lossless compression scheme like alac or flac, and I find the support generally more universal. Plus with a lot of apple devices, alac is a reliable way to get lossless audio everywhere in my experience. My only reason for having responded to the wav point at all was that I don't believe 'just convert your library to wav' is a pertinent solution to the problem. I didn't mean to get into a file container war - that's definitely for another thread 
[@mention:1566878603953050] - yes indeed. A muso. Although unfortunately that was a little while ago, and both Kazoo server and naim have moved on, and I neither have the muso nor a record of exactly which version of Kazoo server I was using at the time. So apart from some knowledge that this could/should/is-close-to working I need to debug a bit from first principles. And in this case Kazoo Server works to serve the Media App contents (e.g. BBC aac streams). Just not local content.
Thanks all for your thoughts!
Posted on: 08 November 2017 by Mike-B
@davidbath Re your point about not seeing the point in WAV vs a lossless format; agreed its a personal choice & depending on the variables of other equipment & applications used, if it works for you, why not. Personally I don't use Apple or iTunes so have no reason for ALAC/AIFF. WRT equipment & applications; I do have an issue with FLAC in that my NAS DMA does not play gapless correctly when transcoding (FLAC to WAV) I choose to have my NDX play WAV (either straight or transcoded from FLAC) as it sounds better. Hence my preference on my equipment is for WAV.
Posted on: 09 November 2017 by davidbath
Hi [@mention:36201736949470193] - good point indeed. They are possible fall backs, but they lack the metadata and playlist integration from iTunes. Which I know is an unhelpful constraint but was the initial reason for going down this path. Given that this doesn't appear to be a fundamental network/streamer/upnp problem (as some streaming from Kazoo server works), I was hoping someone might have seem similar behaviour before.
