I haven’t test mine so when I get home I will try it out.is it not stuttering like crazy? i asked them to turn MQA off, and yup only 88/96 ha ha , this is not beta, this is alpha and we are unit testing
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WiiM Mini Streamer
- Thread starter Globuli
- Start date
AMHD GAPLESS STILL NOT WORKING
I hope Wiim is watching this thread and provides better answers. Gapless is still not working. I'm on the latest firmware, I was on the Beta before and that didn't work either. Gapless by definition should work like this: The first sample of a new track should play exactly 1/Fs sec. after the last sample of the preceding track. No interruptions of the SPDIF stream. This is important not only for those "gapless" albums but for EVERY album. When an album is being "sequenced" an important part of this process is to establish the spacing between songs. This is part of the creative process and I can tell you from experience that moving tracks back and forth *very small* fractions of a second in the timeline has a definite musical and creative impact to the flow of the listening experience. This has been perfectly delivered by Audio CDs from Day 1 and there is no reason to give up that achievement. If you are playing tracks on your PC, same thing. The only blips to be expected are when there is a sampling rate change between tracks.
AMHD plays gapless perfectly in the PC and the iOS apps. The question is, will this ever work on Wiim?
From brief testing it appears that Wiim is trying to cheat by using short crossfades between tracks (look at the time remaining display at transitions between songs). This is not acceptable. Scrolling the timeline is exceedingly buggy too. It is basically non-functional, you advance the cursor and playback stops and a long time later the track jumps to the next one.
So, Wiim, will you solve these issues soon, or ever? As of now, this is not acceptable performance. This is an order of magnitude more important than being able to play full-resolution - what good is great sound if you cannot hear an album without hiccups and blips? I guess I'll have to go back to a music PC, already have a small fanless CPU that can do what I want perfectly.
I hope Wiim is watching this thread and provides better answers. Gapless is still not working. I'm on the latest firmware, I was on the Beta before and that didn't work either. Gapless by definition should work like this: The first sample of a new track should play exactly 1/Fs sec. after the last sample of the preceding track. No interruptions of the SPDIF stream. This is important not only for those "gapless" albums but for EVERY album. When an album is being "sequenced" an important part of this process is to establish the spacing between songs. This is part of the creative process and I can tell you from experience that moving tracks back and forth *very small* fractions of a second in the timeline has a definite musical and creative impact to the flow of the listening experience. This has been perfectly delivered by Audio CDs from Day 1 and there is no reason to give up that achievement. If you are playing tracks on your PC, same thing. The only blips to be expected are when there is a sampling rate change between tracks.
AMHD plays gapless perfectly in the PC and the iOS apps. The question is, will this ever work on Wiim?
From brief testing it appears that Wiim is trying to cheat by using short crossfades between tracks (look at the time remaining display at transitions between songs). This is not acceptable. Scrolling the timeline is exceedingly buggy too. It is basically non-functional, you advance the cursor and playback stops and a long time later the track jumps to the next one.
So, Wiim, will you solve these issues soon, or ever? As of now, this is not acceptable performance. This is an order of magnitude more important than being able to play full-resolution - what good is great sound if you cannot hear an album without hiccups and blips? I guess I'll have to go back to a music PC, already have a small fanless CPU that can do what I want perfectly.
While WiiM support do drop in and out of this thread, this isn’t their support forum. Use the feedback section in the WiiM app to let them know about your issues so that they can inspect your logs and hopefully provide a solution.
It's easier to maintain gapless playback from Amazon Music PC app because music is resampled by the app and being played with the same sample rate.
Scot_Douglas
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I just wish my pucks would update to the latest firmware. :|
It is true that the PC app outputs at whatever the sampling rate is selected as the max available for your sound card. At 24bit/192K, I feel it is not optimal but acceptable when resampling is taking place. Bit perfect playback (no resampling) was one of the Wiim selling points for me. What I'm saying is that, within an album, there should be no changes of the sampling rate, and gapless should work. The great majority of music available in AMHD is still at 16/44.1, so even jumping around albums should be completely seamless as far as the SPDIF stream goes. It shouldn't be so hard to queue the next track to play immediately.
Ralph_Cramden
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A basic Python script to query Tidal (or Qobuz or Deezer) for an album, then start playing it on the WiiM Mini.
Only dependencies are streamrip and upnpclient.
Example is Tidal-specific, but the streamrip library also supports the other services, which I have not tested.
Only dependencies are streamrip and upnpclient.
Example is Tidal-specific, but the streamrip library also supports the other services, which I have not tested.
Python:
import upnpclient
import streamrip
########### CHANGE ME TO WiiM Mini's IP #############
IP='192.168.68.112'
#####################################################
description_url = f"http://{IP}:49152/description.xml"
tc = streamrip.clients.TidalClient()
tc.login()
query='miles davis kind of blue'
items = tc.search(query=query,media_type="album")['items']
item= items[1]
album = tc.get(item['id'],'album')
songs = []
curtrack = 1
tracks=""
for track in album['tracks']:
#print(track)
song = {}
song["id"] = track["id"]
song["albumid"]=track["album"]["id"]
song["artistid"]=track["artist"]["id"]
song["volumeNumber"] = track['volumeNumber']
song["trackNumber"] = track['trackNumber']
song["name"] = track['title'].replace('&','&')
song["artist"] = track['artist']['name'].replace('&','&')
song["album"] = track['album']['title'].replace('&','&')
song["url"] = tc.get_file_url(track_id=track['id'],quality=2,video=False)['url'].replace('&','&')
url = track["album"]["cover"].replace('-','/')
cover_art_url = f"https://resources.tidal.com/images/{url}/1280x1280.jpg"
song["cover_art_url"] = cover_art_url
trackxml=f'<Track{curtrack}><URL>wiimu_search://{song["id"]}</URL><Source>Tidal</Source><Metadata><DIDL-Lite xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:upnp="urn:schemas-upnp-org:metadata-1-0/upnp/" xmlns:song="www.wiimu.com/song/" xmlns:custom="www.wiimu.com/custom/" xmlns="urn:schemas-upnp-org:metadata-1-0/DIDL-Lite/"><upnp:class>object.item.audioItem.musicTrack</upnp:class><item><song:id>{song["id"]}</song:id><song:albumid>{song["albumid"]}</song:albumid><song:singerid>{song["artistid"]}</song:singerid><dc:title>{song["name"]}</dc:title><upnp:artist>{song["artist"]}</upnp:artist><upnp:album>{song["album"]}</upnp:album><upnp:albumArtURI>{song["cover_art_url"]}</upnp:albumArtURI></item></DIDL-Lite></Metadata></Track{curtrack}>'
tracks = tracks+trackxml
curtrack=curtrack+1
########################################################################################
dev = upnpclient.Device(description_url)
QUEUE_NAME=album["title"].replace('&','&')
xml = f'<?xml version="1.0"?><PlayList><ListName>{QUEUE_NAME}</ListName><ListInfo><SourceName>Tidal</SourceName><SearchUrl>https://api.tidal.com/v1/albums/{album["id"]}/tracks?countryCode=US&offset=0&limit=50</SearchUrl> <MaxTrackNumber>{album["numberOfTracks"]}</MaxTrackNumber><TrackNumber>0</TrackNumber><Quality>0</Quality><requestQuality>LOSSLESS</requestQuality></ListInfo><Tracks>{tracks}</Tracks></PlayList>'
#### Stop the WiiM Mini
dev.AVTransport.Stop(InstanceID='0')
#### Populate the WiiM Queue
dev.PlayQueue.CreateQueue(QueueContext=xml)
#### Play
dev.PlayQueue.PlayQueueWithIndex(QueueName=QUEUE_NAME,Index=0)I thought the same until I've found an album with different sample rates on AM.
Bamyasi
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Thank you @egbx ! I also wanted to reiterate for those who missed this observation in my earlier post: gapless playback works perfectly fine and as smoothly as it should be from inside WiiM Mini app when using Qobuz. Same albums fail to play without gaps when streamed from Amazon Music. Same system, same hardware, same basic firmware. So it is not the WiiM problem per se, I suspect Amazon Music API simply does not care about supporting gapless playback, hence adding it by third parties may turn out not such an easy task.
The odd thing about it is that Qobuz does not support gapless playback in its own software players on any platform, AFAIK. But it works perfectly gapless on WiiM Mini.
EDITED: Here is a perfect album for testing gapless playback for those who hate Pink Floyd.
I think you are right. It doesn't sound like real gapless and if you try to move forward in a track it jumps to the next track. I need to listen more but it sound like there is a small stutter between tracks?
Some of the firmware updates turned UHD off for me, go back and check your Alexa setting and turn on UHD for all Wiim devices that you have.
I like using "One from the Vault" by Grateful Dead. Track one is the Bill Graham intro that flows right into Help on the way/Slipnot/Franklin's tower. No way to listen to that album without gapless playback.
I understand your frustration regarding gapless but you do realize you only pay a fraction of a price in contrast with other streamer. You do realize no other developer that can deliver the features and bug fix in faster rate even in comparison with expensive streamer. Let’s face the fact that no streamer is perfect but for what you pay for you got your money worth with the features that comes with it. If wiim doesn’t give you what you’re looking for then move on and use what’s works for you. To me like what’s music1969 said it was gapless.
Bamyasi
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AFAIK, "the other" streamer does not support gapless playback at all, not even for local files. And by the way, we are not talking about money here on this forum, we are talking about technical excellence. For me as a software developer, experiencing bugs in a someone else's program causes almost physical pain since I cannot fix it. I know it is sometimes considered some kind of a disorder but please take into account that we owe our current civilization to workings of many such "disordered" people.
Not that I think the gapless playback is a civilization scale problem but still my $.02.
Ralph_Cramden
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So use the Qobuz, Tidal, etc. APIs to write your own UI for the WiiM. I'm quite happy with the one I wrote for Tidal, perfectly suited to the way I play music (jazz, an album at a time, with reviews, bios, liner notes immediately visible and updatable). Your requirements will differ, but the WiiM's UPnP interface and its built-in ability to connect to all the services, makes it quite doable. Here's one another member here wrote: https://github.com/chrishuangcf/wiim-mini-ui
WiiM Support
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Hi, thanks for your information and let me clarify it here. Can you please check the album or playlist if it has the same sample rate and bit-depth when the gapless doesn't work? When we're doing the bit-perfect output, we need output the exact same sample rate as the source. When the tracks have the different sample rate or bit-depth, we have to change the format of audio output and the audio settings. It'll introduce the gap since your SPDIF receiver needs re-lock the optical signal too due to the changed audio format/resolution. We can work-around this issue by up-sampling everything to the same resolution (like most others are doing like your PC), however, it'll break the bit perfect output and won't give you the best possible audio quality.
If your album or playlist has the same sample rate and bit-depth but still hear the gap, please send us a feedback via WiiM App. We'll look at this issue immediately.
Sorry. It is not about money or value at all. To be able to hear an album as intended by the creators - correct timing and seamless flow between tracks included, should be basic functionality of a music playback device that plays albums. I'm surprised that this is perceived as a pedantic demand. If gapless AMHD is technically not feasible due to API constraints or any other reason, it should be simply stated by Wiim. But Wiim keeps promising gapless AMHD. That is why I am taking them at their word.
Every gapless album I've tried fails to play gaplessly. A good example is Joe Jackson's "Night and Day" (the built-in crossfades in the original make it very obvious if the playback is not gapless). This is a "normal" 16/44.1 album in AMHD. Yes I've run into a few odd albums with assorted sample rates, but those are exceptions really.
Bamyasi
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WiiM UPnP built-in renderer does not support gapless playback. It might be still doable but certainly a waste of time. The fact that I know how to write programs does not mean I have to do this for every piece of hardware I use, from my car to my network streamer. I have other thing to program for, thanks very much.
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