wiim pro limitations and frustrations

[zuul]

i've had my wiim pro for about 9 months now and there's a lot i like about it... but there are a few things about it that really bother me and have me wondering if it's even worth for me to keep or if i should go back to using my mac mini for streaming full time...

my main streaming platform is amazon unlimited.

the main problem seems to be flash storage.

i have a lot of really long playlists. some have 1000's of songs and are 100's of hours long.

the wiim pro running amazon unlimited natively cannot fully load these playlists. not only that. in order to get it to load all that it can.. you have to physically scroll to the bottom of the page and wait for the next page to load... scroll down to the bottom again... and wait for the next page to load... etc. after you do that five or six times it can't load anymore and so you're stuck with whatever percentage of the playlist it can hold in it's memory. in many cases... it's only a fraction of the actual playlist.

similarly... i like to go to the "songs" tab of my library and shuffle my entire collection that way. 74,000 songs. easy using the desktop app on my mac mini... or my phone or tablet... again impossible on the wiim pro. in fact. it will only load my library up to the letter "E" and then it can't hold any more information.

it's unfortunate that the wiim memory is not modular b/c i would pay for the extra ram if it meant i could do the above mentioned activities.

now. the convenience of the wiim... ease of use... the sound quality... and as a device in general... it's fine and gets the job done....

while i can cast from the amazon music app or the spotify app to the WIIM and accomplish what i want that way.... ie. playing all the songs in my playlists... regardless of the size of the playlist... it's VIA wifi. not hardwired and as such... in doing so i am limited to 16/44.1. spotify has no option to stream from the WIIM directly like amazon and so ultimately that's a no go for me.

when i use the ethernet connection on my WIIM and then use it as the "head" to play amazon music that's when i am able to achieve HI-RES audio direct from the WIIM and take advantage of that feature. that feature is not available when streaming TO the wiim from another device. only when streaming directly from the WIIM. i noticed the same with TIDAL actually during a brief test of that service a while back (i was not impressed).

so at this juncture. it seems i'm still stuck using the amazon app on my mac mini to do what i want in hi-res but if i'm willing to rock standard res via wifi i can stream my entire library that way w/out having to use the mac.

so i guess ultimately the question is: is this a limitation of the flash memory of the WIIM Pro? or is it a server side issue where amazon is not sending the data in a way that the WIIM can accept it all?

it would be great if the memory was modular and you could add more to suit your needs.

anyway. that's where i'm at. if anyone has any suggestions, advice or observations to share... thanks in advance!

 

[Burnside]

while i can cast from the amazon music app or the spotify app to the WIIM and accomplish what i want that way.... ie. playing all the songs in my playlists... regardless of the size of the playlist... it's VIA wifi. not hardwired and as such... in doing so i am limited to 16/44.1. spotify has no option to stream from the WIIM directly like amazon and so ultimately that's a no go for me.

How are you casting from the Amazon Music app? If you have linked your WiiM home app to Alexa, unless you’re in a region that doesn’t support AlexaCast, you should be able to cast bit perfect up to 24/192 from your mobile, irrespective of whether your WiiM is hardwired or using Ethernet - it doesn’t matter as the stream is coming over the internet from the cloud to your device. Are you perhaps using airplay or Chromecast which would limit playback to CD quality at best?

 

[zuul]

How are you casting from the Amazon Music app? If you have linked your WiiM home app to Alexa, unless you’re in a region that doesn’t support AlexaCast, you should be able to cast bit perfect up to 24/192 from your mobile, irrespective of whether your WiiM is hardwired or using Ethernet - it doesn’t matter as the stream is coming over the internet from the cloud to your device. Are you perhaps using airplay or Chromecast which would limit playback to CD quality at best?

ah. ok. i was streaming through chromecast it turns out. i didn't even have alexa installed on my phone but i had it activated in wiim. now it's working.

is the only way to play music via alexa to tell it to play something? or can you click on on album or playlist and then have alexa send it to the wiim?

thanks for your help! much appreciated.

 

[Burnside]

ah. ok. i was streaming through chromecast it turns out. i didn't even have alexa installed on my phone but i had it activated in wiim. now it's working.

is the only way to play music via alexa to tell it to play something? or can you click on on album or playlist and then have alexa send it to the wiim?

thanks for your help! much appreciated.

Connecting to Alexa in the WiiM app facilitates both voice control and casting using the round icon in the Amazon Music app target device page, with both means delivering up to 24/192 bit perfect to your WiiM device.

If you use the Amazon Music app, you can either connect to your WiiM device under your profile/settings and then select what you want to play, or you can select something and start playing to your phone, then from the now playing page choose the cast icon followed by your WiiM device (with the round icon) from the target device list.

If I recall, you can also select recently played and other content from the Alexa app music & podcast page and it’ll ask what device you want it played on.

And, as you know, you can also play from within the WiiM home app. All means of selection offer the same hi res bit perfect streams.

 

[zuul]

it seems like the round icon that i used to be able to see is gone. the only place i see it now is under the actual alexa icon...

when i used to hit the cast icon it would give me 2 choices either chromecast or alexa. only the chromecast icon is listed now...

what did i do wrong?

 

[Mr Ee]

i noticed the same with TIDAL actually

Tidal connect works up to 192 too, so not sure what you had going on!
Do you only have the one wiim? Apart from app setings somewhere, the only other reason I can think of that reduces sample rate is grouped wiims.

 

[zuul]

so i got it to work once. and now when i ever i try to cast from any of my android devices to the wiim i get "something is wrong please try again later" this has been happening for over an hour. i'm not sure what happened. but when i can get it to work my choices are "cast from this device" or "join session" neither of which will let me play what's on my amazon music app via alexa to the wiim. it's very frustrating. i'm not sure why i can't get it to work. when i log into the amazon app it says "connecting to wiim player" but then it actually won't play anything.

i'm thinking i might just go back to using a mac mini b/c i have had this wiim for 10 months and i just can't get it to do what i want it do. which is play music from my amazon library that's not in the form of a playlist.

even more odd. is the only thing it will seem to play is podcasts. but no music. i don't get it.

 

[Wiimer]

so i got it to work once. and now when i ever i try to cast from any of my android devices to the wiim i get "something is wrong please try again later" this has been happening for over an hour. i'm not sure what happened. but when i can get it to work my choices are "cast from this device" or "join session" neither of which will let me play what's on my amazon music app via alexa to the wiim. it's very frustrating. i'm not sure why i can't get it to work. when i log into the amazon app it says "connecting to wiim player" but then it actually won't play anything.

i'm thinking i might just go back to using a mac mini b/c i have had this wiim for 10 months and i just can't get it to do what i want it do. which is play music from my amazon library that's not in the form of a playlist.

even more odd. is the only thing it will seem to play is podcasts. but no music. i don't get it.

First, please try clearing the Amazon music app cache and restarting your phone.

In my experience, repeated AlexaCast connections and disconnections (on multiple devices) can quickly cause problems. I believe this is an issue on the Amazon music side.

You can also try reinstalling the Amazon music app if you have not downloaded the songs to the phone's internal storage with the Amazon music app. (Note that reinstalling the app will delete the downloaded songs.)

 

[zuul]

First, please try clearing the Amazon music app cache and restarting your phone.

In my experience, repeated AlexaCast connections and disconnections (on multiple devices) can quickly cause problems. I believe this is an issue on the Amazon music side.

You can also try reinstalling the Amazon music app if you have not downloaded the songs to the phone's internal storage with the Amazon music app. (Note that reinstalling the app will delete the downloaded songs.)

i did everything you listed. including doing a factory reset on the WIIM itself and i also deleted the amazon music app off of all of my devices but one.

cleared all the caches. reinstalled amazon music and the wiim amp.

still... when i try to connnect via alexa i get this every time.... i'm not a luddite or anything... i'm fairly knowledgable about such things. i just can't get this particular alexa things worked out.

like i said. it seems like the WIIM player is good for someone who doesn't need as much customization or memory or whatever is preventing me from being able to do what i want to do but it seems the only way i can play music from amazon on the WIIM is to log directly into amazon via wiim. and then when i do that it works fine. except it can only play about 30% of my library. it will only load the albums up to the letter "E" which is useless to me.

anyway. here are the screenshots. i play a song. i click on the cast button to send it to the WIIM. it tells me something is already playing on the WIIM. that's impossible. there's literally nothing playing on it and there's no other app open other than amazon music. my guess is b/c it thinks there's already something playing it won't let me cast. but i don't know why that's happening b/c i'm not playing anything on the WIIM when i open the wiim app there's nothing playing.

pretty much at this point i will just box it up and sell it on ebay. i can stream everything i want the way i want from my mac mini and JRiver.

i was really hoping the WIIM would be the solution i was looking for as far as streaming goes but it's not and after 10 months of trying to get to work right i have finally given up.

 

[Wiimer]

anyway. here are the screenshots. i play a song. i click on the cast button to send it to the WIIM. it tells me something is already playing on the WIIM. that's impossible. there's literally nothing playing on it and there's no other app open other than amazon music. my guess is b/c it thinks there's already something playing it won't let me cast. but i don't know why that's happening b/c i'm not playing anything on the WIIM when i open the wiim app there's nothing playing.

As you say, that dialogue usually appears when Amazon music is playing on another device on your personal plan.

At least it doesn't happen on my WiiM devices, so I think it's reasonable to assume that there is an inherent issue somewhere in your app, account, phone, network or device.

 

[zuul]

As you say, that dialogue usually appears when Amazon music is playing on another device on your personal plan.

At least it doesn't happen on my WiiM devices, so I think it's reasonable to assume that there is an inherent issue somewhere in your app, account, phone, network or device.

you're probably right. but i don't have the time or energy or even care at this point enough to chase down bugs in my app, account, phone, network or device.

it should work out of the box as advertised. it does not. i should not need hours and hours of tech support and spend days and days in forums to get a streaming device to play a song i want to hear. that's preposterous.

like i said. the amazon music app on my my mac mini works fine. i'll just pull out an old monitor so i don't have to use my tv as the head for it anymore. and be done with it.

 

[Burnside]

you're probably right. but i don't have the time or energy or even care at this point enough to chase down bugs in my app, account, phone, network or device.

it should work out of the box as advertised. it does not. i should not need hours and hours of tech support and spend days and days in forums to get a streaming device to play a song i want to hear. that's preposterous.

like i said. the amazon music app on my my mac mini works fine. i'll just pull out an old monitor so i don't have to use my tv as the head for it anymore. and be done with it.

It does work as advertised (as you seemed to appreciate when you first set it up last October and had it working) and I’m sorry you now don’t have the patience to diagnose what’s gone wrong in your setup despite being offered advice and support from the forum.

 

[zuul]

i've tried everything the forum has offered me and none of the suggestions have solved my issue.

i still get an error message anytime i try to cast. and nothing that was suggested here has changed that.

after 10 months of dealing with it? yeah my patience is burned. it's not worth the hassle when there are other streaming devices and other ways for me to listen to music. sure it "works" but it can't play what i want to listen to so for me it's useless device.