Those using "casting" from Amazon Music app direct to WiiM Mini, whether lossly or lossless, and want to see improvements with casting:
I sent the below via the Amazon Music app, on iOS or Android (not Desktop):
Click the cog wheel in top right Go to "Contact Customer Support" -> Amazon Music Unlimited -> Additional Help -> E-mail
If more people can send this or similar, it might get someone's attention there.
If it's just me, nobody will care. You can change or edit as you like or just copy and paste and send from your own accounts.
But I think these 4 things need their attention and really should not be that hard:
There are features not working at all in the Amazon Music app on iOS or Android, when "casting" to Alexa compatible speakers or streamers
Can you please forward this to the engineers developing Amazon Music app, so that they can be made aware and possibly try to fix / improve these things.
I would love to use Amazon Music HD going forward but there are some major functionality issues.
I am casting straight from the Amazon Music iPad and iPhone apps to Alexa streamer which is LinkPlay’s WiiM Mini (“Works with Alexa”).
I believe Amazon Music / Alexa engineers will be aware of LinkPlay:
https://www.linkplay.com/products-powered-by-linkplay
These issues below are directly related to when casting from the iOS Amazon Music app (using Alexa casting - I am not using Airplay) to this Alexa
1. When casting from Amazon Music app on iPad, “Autoplay” does not work. Autoplay is one of the best ways to discovery new and un-heard music. Why this is not functional when casting? It doesn’t make sense to make Autoplay not working when casting.
2. When casting - when I play an album or playlist and there is a play queue, I can’t add individual tracks or albums as ‘play next’ or ‘add to queue’. So I can’t build or change the current play queue ‘on the fly’. This is such a cool feature that for some odd reason gets disabled when casting. Just like Autoplay. I find this strange to disable when casting. Can you please allow this when casting.
3. When casting music - the HD or UHD symbol of the currently playing track shows but when I press HD/UHD, the sample rate and bit depth info of the track is not available. Why? You will see below, having this information showing for the now playing track, is really useful for those of us that want this info.
The above issues only happen when casting. They work fine when not casting but casting is such a useful feature, I’m not sure why these 3 useful features need to disappear when casting ?
The LinkPlay WiiM Mini streamer is currently the first Alexa cast streaming I am aware of that allows up to 24-bit / 192kHz casting straight from the Amazon app to the WiiM Mini, without upsample or downsample like other streamers do.
This device is currently in beta for the WiiM Mini but you can see in the photo at the forum below link, that a user is casting 24bit / 96kHz from his iPhone to the WiiM Mini and his DAC (which connects to the WiiM Mini via TOSlink) is showing the correct 24/96 sample rate. There is no downsample or upsampling. There are no cables between iPhone and DAC showing incoming sample rate. It is done via casting. You can see the casting message “Playing on Charle’s SR-X40A_BETA…". See it here:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/wiim-mini-streamer.31182/page-75#post-1210766
This is such a cool Alexa speaker for getting HD and UHD audio straight to our DACs in our HiFi system with the correct original bit depth and sample rate of the music FLAC file. We care about this.
This is where knowing the original track sample rate would be helpful when casting - the same way the app normally shows you if playing to iPad/iPhone built-in speakers for example.
But for some reason when casting specifically, the Amazon Music app disables the above 3 listed features I mentioned when casting.
Can you please address these issues with the Amazon app when casting?
4. Seperate to casting, we really need the ability to sort an artist’s album and singles release by date. In fact they should default to sort by release date, from newest to oldest.
This is how Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal display an artist discography. It is basic expectation for how we want to see a discog.
Amazon Music’s way of sorting by ‘popularity’ really makes finding an album difficult. It’s a mess to look at. Sometimes the most recent album needs scrolling all the way to the end.
It’s a very tedious process. And it looks like a mess.
I hope these things can be fixed / improved.
There’s many user forum complaints about the mess that artist discography is presented.
I hope your app Engineers can properly consider my feedback.