Wiim Ultra- bugs / strange behaviour of local files library (from USB)

[incans]

I've only had the Wiim Ultra about a month, so still finding my way around. For many years (pre-Wiim) i've been streaming my local music (ripped CDs) from a server running either Plex or miniDLNA. The core library consists 3000 or so tracks, 90%+ of which are FLAC ripped from CD, plus a few individual tracks in MP3. My servers are currently out of action, but given the Ultra has a USB port that's compatible with USB storage, I thought I could just dump my music library onto a big memory stick, and Bob's Your Uncle...

This partially works, but I have found the behaviour of the Wiim librarian and local file player features to have some bugs, or possibly "features"?

1. Most annoying is the fact that the library fails to see and index quite a few files that are on the memory stick. For example I have the album "Marc Cohn" (by Marc Cohn) on the USB stick, comprising 11 FLAC files. However the Wiim library only acknowledges 6 of them.
   
   Incredibly, it manages to NOT let me see and play my favourite tracks on this album! (I'm just wondering now if the Wiim somehow chokes on files that have a tag for a high 5-star rating applied by MediaMonkey. That would be pretty ironic.)
   
   
2. After I attached the USB stick for the first time and indexed the contents, I was very surprised to find that I could unplug the USB stick and take it away, but the Wiim would still list AND play the content?! I asume this mean the Wiim doesn't just "index" a source device, it actually copies the data into a local cache on the device. That's ok but-
   
   a) What happens if the USB device (say a USB portable hard disk) is much larger than the Ultra's internal memory?
   b) How do you clear out files that have been cached locally, but you have changed or deleted the file on the memory stick?
   c) Is there any way to get stats on the library? (e.g. % of capacity used, no of "stale" tracks buffered locally)?
   
   
3. A library of decent size is almost bound to include near-duplicates, e.g. the same track on different albums. The Wiim just shows these in a single flat track list. This isn't very helpful. For example I have a AC/DC live compilation album that contains the same track 6 times. The Wiim lists these with identical track names and artists (not unreasonably), which makes it impossible to make a meaningful choice.
   
   My preference would be for tracks that are "the same" (based on a rule such as artist name+track name) to be listed as a single entry for the track, with a sub-list showing the key fields that might differ such as-
   
   a) Album artist(s)
   b) File format, bit rate, (dynamic range?)
   c) Track length
   

I can't believe I am the only user to have run into these issues. Are they well-known problems, and any comment from Wiim on whether they are going to be worked on?

Note: The tag "usb output" makes no sense, but I can't find a tag that does relate to this issue, and the forum seems to insist on having a pre-existing tag assigned to every post.

 

[Aquaman]

Ony speculating on the basis of what I have experienced with other players of this kind. I haven‘t tried the USB input on the Ultra myself yet.
My take is that the USB media inter-connect is only meant for occasional use with smallish amounts of data. So not a serious alternatve for full library integration. Nobody goes along advertising this. Instead they simply say that USB media can be played back.

 

[incans]

Ony speculating on the basis of what I have experienced with other players of this kind. I haven‘t tried the USB input on the Ultra myself yet.
My take is that the USB media inter-connect is only meant for occasional use with smallish amounts of data. So not a serious alternatve for full library integration. Nobody goes along advertising this. Instead they simply say that USB media can be played back.

I'm not convinced. I have found the rest of the Wiim software to be pretty good. Not perfect because it's a young product line and they are clearly aiming to move quickly in terms of features, but overall this looks much more like a product that involves significant software development expertise, vs. something built by a company that primarily makes hardware, and then just gets a couple of contract developers to bang together an interface.

I can see that a fully functional media library is a non-trivial piece of functionality, applications like miniDLNA or Jellyfin have many years of work in them, but I would expect Wiim to be _aiming_ for a production-ready solution, even if they are not there yet.

 

[Skull]

I find the WHA to be all I need for a music server using a usb hard drive
I don’t have a huge library but all my tracks play ok and no duplicates are showing using the WHA

 

[pjorgenunes]

Ony speculating on the basis of what I have experienced with other players of this kind. I haven‘t tried the USB input on the Ultra myself yet.
My take is that the USB media inter-connect is only meant for occasional use with smallish amounts of data. So not a serious alternatve for full library integration. Nobody goes along advertising this. Instead they simply say that USB media can be played back.

I ran a 2TB HDD with almost 2000 albums (flac from 16/44.1 - 24/192) connected to USB of my WiiM Ultra without major issues.

It takes a long time to first índex and, in the past, when I ejected the disc and deleted albums it would keep them in the index (although not playing them obviously because the files weren’t there anymore).

 

[incans]

Interesting. I checked my USB stick on the originating machine (Linux) and it contains 3460 files in 420 directories, totalling 39.2GB of data. However the Wiim only picked up about 2700 or so, so there's a lot missing.

I did a quick re-check of the files on the USB stick and I can't see any obvious reasons for there to be problems. Owner and permissions are consistent, at least when viewed in Linux. Only a few files have "funny" characters in their names (such as apostrophes and non-ASCII Unicode) and these don't map to the iles the Wiim is missing, so the reasons are unclear.

 

[harkpabst]

Interesting. I checked my USB stick on the originating machine (Linux) and it contains 3460 files in 420 directories, totalling 39.2GB of data. However the Wiim only picked up about 2700 or so, so there's a lot missing.

I did a quick re-check of the files on the USB stick and I can't see any obvious reasons for there to be problems. Owner and permissions are consistent, at least when viewed in Linux. Only a few files have "funny" characters in their names (such as apostrophes and non-ASCII Unicode) and these don't map to the iles the Wiim is missing, so the reasons are unclear.

As a first step I would simply have the WiiM Ultra rescan the USB drive (see above screenshot by @Skull). Give it some time.

The apps says you don't need to keep it open during scanning, but doing so won't hurt. The Ultra creates a database and a cover art cache on the stick itself (enough free memory left for that?) and it synchronises this with the WiiM Home App.

Contents is not copied over to either the device or the app, apart from some normal buffering. In general you cannot play anything from the stick once it has been removed.

Use the Eject USB Disk function prior to pulling the stick to be on the safe side.

 

[Aquaman]

As a first step I would simply have the WiiM Ultra rescan the USB drive (see above screenshot by @Skull). Give it some time.

The apps says you don't need to keep it open during scanning, but doing so won't hurt. The Ultra creates a database and a cover art cache on the stick itself (enough free memory left for that?) and it synchronises this with the WiiM Home App.

Contents is not copied over to either the device or the app, apart from some normal buffering. In general you cannot play anything from the stick once it has been removed.

Use the Eject USB Disk function prior to pulling the stick to be on the safe side.

Maybe the stick is formated FAT32, not leaving enough space for the database?
On the other hand it should not take up 39GB of data in this case in the first place.
Just an idea …

 

[harkpabst]

Maybe the stick is formated FAT32, not leaving enough space for the database?
On the other hand it should not take up 39GB of data in this case in the first place.
Just an idea …

You mean the file size of the single database file itself? That shouldn't be an issue even with FAT32. Even with tenths of thousands of entries the database size is pretty small.

With cover art embedded into each music file there's more of a potential issue with images being duplicated many times. But it's still just a matter of total free space left on the USB memory drive.

 

[incans]

Maybe the stick is formated FAT32, not leaving enough space for the database?
On the other hand it should not take up 39GB of data in this case in the first place.
Just an idea …

The USB drive is formatted NTFS, as these days that's quite convenient to use from both Windows and Linux.

 

[incans]

Looking at the results of the original scan of the USB drive, it's clear the scan was not complete. I think there is an element of sequential (ASCII sort order) ordering of the scan, because it seemed to be that it was tracks and/or artists with names that sort later (names beginning with 'T' up to 'Z') that were missing.

I did a clean+rescan of the drive, and this time it picked up all 3460 files.

The question around whether the files are copied/cached or not came down to me not understanding the relationship between indexing files and whether this makes them part of "My Music".

As it happens I have a copy of most of my main music library on my phone already (so I have music available while travelling). Thus the same tracks were appearing in the USB source and "My Music"->local, which made it look as if these might be related. Thus when it seemed I was able to play a track from the USB drive even when it wasn't connected, that was not the case. I was actually playing the other copy that was pre-existing on the phone, from the "local" source. Now it makes sense but I was confused for a while.