Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Sooloos sometimes severly tests the sanity & the patience

I must say that the whole metadata thing is hardly limited to Sooloos. I've had all sorts of problems getting, for example, album artwork properly into iTunes. I would estimate that probably one-third of my CD rips did not have artwork, and I spent hours and hours trying to figure out why I could not drag-and-drop - only to finally discover that I was encoding as WAV files which do not support artwork. Aaarrgh!

I do wish that that there was an easier way to combine multiple CD sets into one Sooloos 'album'. Seems like the 'unalbumize' feature ought to do this, but it only works with computer files, not with CD rips.

Or how about the dealers hosting the events doing it? It may well raise their profile amongst HHers for showing good support (rather than just being able to host what is in effect a sales event).

There is one thing Roland having teflon shoulders when in the presence of half dozen or so HHers (many of them pretty high profile and/or out spoken ones at that), but having the same attitude towards premium partners is probably even less good form and hopefully one that M staff will rise to the challenge and actually take ownership of the issues.

Simon, do you not use "create set" to group albums together ?

Not sure how much easier you would like it to be ?

OK, maybe I'm just dense, but I lost patince trying to get it to work on ControlPC/iPad. I assumed it only works with the full Sooloos displays.

Can't remember. Will have to check that when I'm home.

What would you recommend to them instead?

Nice response thanks.

My frustrations stems from the lack of communication from Meridian to their customers as anything else. They really should employ some PR - I first said "better PR" until I remembered this is non existent at the moment.

A prime example was the ham fisted way they handled the 861 firmware upgrade. Handled correctly it would have sponsored cries of joy and love but their "big Brother" approach elicited heaps of resentment.

Spending dollars on advertising but ignoring their valuable customer base because they feel the cost is unjustified is a recipe for ultimate failure.

Along with everyone here I do not want to see Meridian fail but their present policies/attitudes are not encouraging, nor is Ian's comment that the bugs might never be fixed. There could be a basic problem in that the original developers of the Sooloos firmware have moved on so fixing up the bugs is an insuperable task - this has been suggested to me by my son who is a USA IT manager in a big global company and a top CAD programmer. If so, that gives greater validation to what Ian said and underlines even more how they should not be appearing to ignore us.

I really do not accept that Meridian are too small to be able to afford better PR. So I'll will do what Carl suggests and write to Meridian about all this in due course and post the letter up here.

John

Hi John

I've been following the thread (and others) and I can feel your growing frustration. I think any of us who have bought into Sooloos will agree that a substantial investment demands industry-leading support and real attention to detail. These are indeed the hallmarks of successful high-end retailing in any sector (I used to work in London selling top flight wine - it's a similar market).

My own experience has been that while the system hasn't been quite as niggle-free as I was promised, I have been able to enjoy a pretty stable and reliable system. It sounds like your dealer needs to step up and support you with some of your annoyances. I know that Meridian has expanded their customer service facility in the last 12 months, but that's really set up to support dealers in supporting their customers, rather than dealing with customers directly.

I agree that metadata for classical music is poor, but that's out of M's control. There is no good database of that stuff anywhere to draw on, as far as I know. I also agree that the lack of track level metadata limits how effectively this can be organised - but from my cursory knowledge of databases this is a pretty deep 'structural' issue which would take a major revamp to address. We may have to wait a few years, I think realistically. By that time, the cloud / wiki concept will surely have to be integral too, and I've no doubt that the data we painstakingly enter will indeed be available to others, which will dramatically increase the scope and detail of the information available.

In the meantime, I have created my own 2000x2000 cover scans for over 2000 CDs I have ripped and in general I have had no problem adding them as I tidy up the data after ripping each disc. I have found that the small and large versions don't always match, but usually a simple close and re-start of ControlMac addresses this. Very occassionally I have had to re-boot the entire system, TwinStore, control and all, but then it has found them all and syncronised with no problem.

From a housekeeping point of view, I leave the whole system on all the time but I do a re-boot of the whole lot every week or two, or every few hundred CDs if I have been having a ripping session. Long experience has taught me that all PC-based systems benefit from a chance to clear caches and catch up with themselves every once in a while.

Good luck with it all

Dominic

Mike:

Your ripping approach in WiKi has been very helpful to me, thanks for taking the time to write it down. Also solves my multi-disc set problem with ControlPC as the 'unalbumize' feature now works as I need it to.

Simon

Hi Frank

Just noted I have not responded to your sensible question.

There are a number of systems out there but AFAIK they all fail for serious classical collections because they are all centred around the various databases that concentrate on pop material. And, as others have commented, none of these databases are really up to par.

A computer savvy friend has designed his own PC set up which he says works flawlessly for him, but I do not know the detail although could ask if you or anyone else is interested.

So I guess my advice to anyone about Sooloos would be this:
1. It is relatively user friendly
2. It is flexible regarding distribution of music around the house
3. It yields superb AQ
4. It has a poor search engine for classical items - needs a lot of work
5. Expect only around 75% of a classical CD collection to register satisfactorily from the database
6. Correcting missing or incorrect data can be a very time consuming and frustrating exercise
7. Whether or not its high expense, relative to the above, makes it a worthwhile investment is something each person needs to weight up.

Despite all the frustrations I've listed from time to time I'm not regretting buying into Sooloos as I sincerely hope its shortcomings will eventually be addressed. I've been keeping in touch with my very good dealer and he advises that once work on the new iPad APP is complete, we should see improvements on the present deficiencies.

I try to be optimistic but that dealer, who does talk to Meridian, has, in the last 3 months, been unable to get a response from Meridian concerning various items brought to their attention. This lack of communication is not encouraging.

Not sure I really have answered your question except to say to someone, look around to see what is on offer. If Sooloos is the best answer then go for it but be aware of its present shortcomings as well as the much touted positives.

John

Thanks for your response.

I think there are two areas for discussion.

1. Problems arising from the databases every music server relies on which makes life for a classical music collector a PITA; i.e., problems which are not Sooloos specific.

2. Problems which are Sooloos specific.

If we focus on problems which are Sooloos specific, I think we are more likely to get them addressed.

I feel your pain. I imported my collection of approximately 1200 classical CDs into iTunes five or so years ago, and I had to hand edit virtually all of the metadata for correctness and consistency. I ended up importing classical pieces as a single file rather than by movement because I didn't have the patience to hand edit all of the the movement metadata which was a mess as well.

Frank,

Good analysis of the situation.

Concentrating on the Sooloos database, it seems waste of effort for each of us needing to edit our collections. If all our work could be pooled, it could rapidly evolve into the best database available -> a huge plus for Meridian.

The bugs in ControlPC should be fixable but I'm not so sure about the other negatives for classical collections. I say this because the whole system is centred around ARTIST, not COMPOSER.

Trying to focus on composers in this large collection is a mess. You need to find the composers using their first names rather than surnames. OK we know it is Frederick Chopin so you look under F but there are heaps of other composers whose first names elude me.

I just tried to check on this using ControlPC but it would not load either on this PC or the notebook. Uninstalling and reinstalling gave the same result. Maybe Meridian are messing around ready to release the iPad App?

If you use Sooloos for background music or swimming it is fine. But try to locate a classical work and it becomes messy, and quite a bit of that sheets back to the database. So, Sooloos is very user friendly for superficial use, but messy for locating classical works. Hopefully the search engine can be improved but I'm not holding my breath.

John