Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Restoring backup after HD crash in Ensemble taking FOREVER

A fully lossless FLAC ripped CD (the default by Sooloos ControlMac/PC) can range from <200Mb to >600Mb (and more if they are High Resolution Audio). So 312 Mb is low but reasonable for restoring a 1 backed up Sooloos CD. It doesn't need to receive much data (because after all, it is sending a CD to Ensemble, not the other way around).

A better idea might be to bring the laptop to the same room as the other Sooloos device and hook a cheap switch up to the both of them (as well as the rest of the network). This would bypass the possible dodgy cable and hopefully speed up the restore.

It sounds from the respective data transfers that there are a lot of errors on the network, which is causing the receiving end (the Sooloos) to repeatedly tell the sending end (the MBP) to re-try ... hence the 17MB received by the MBP, and the big transfers to the Ensemble.

Under TCP/IP if the receiver gets bad packets it returns an error, forcing a re-try on the transmission after an arbitrary wait period. The result is that everything arrives ... eventually. But it's really slow.

This smells to me like either a faulty cable or a faulty network switch, and of the two I'd tend to suspect the switch - in my experience cables either work or they don't, and tend to get worse over time rather than showing steady-state poor performance.

The other possibility is that there's a network device spewing bad packets onto the network, but if your Internet connection is working normally then this seems less likely. So the advice to get the laptop and the Ensemble into the same room with a cheap switch seems like a good one.

Thank you all for the feedback. I was able to connect directly through the router to bypass the switch and cable leading to that room and all worked as it should...about 40 sec load time per CD. So it is either the switch or the cable. Never would have figured that since it has always "worked" but apparently not well enough.

The only other frustration from this ordeal is the back up does not save the playlists??? What gives with that. A lot of work went into setting those up so not liking the idea of doing that all again. That is a poorly thought out process if you ask me unless I am missing something.

Thanks again!

You're not missing anything - I had the same problem and no-one proposed a solution.

Moving from MC200 to MD600 with a pile of playlists caused them all to be lost. This is quite a big issue IMO.

I did propose a solution to you, which does work fairly easily.

The solution Ronnie suggested makes sense that it would have a good chance to work but in my case I have no other unit to go to for the files and since the information is not on the back up I am SOL. If nothing else this is really a poor engineering design decision for sure. How can someone not think of this one? Maybe if they took a few days to build several playlists from several hundred or thousand CD's then lose them and MAYBE someone would think maybe we should back that data up! Just having some fun with this one.

Back to my issue. I replaced the primary cable going to that room and will work with that for a while to see if that solves my issue. The next step would be to replace the switch. Really hard to trouble shoot because now that I have the back up restored I have no process to use to determine how well each corrective step improves matters. One thing I will say is I have an older laptop that would not load Control:PC without constantly giving me a read script error but now it loads with no issues with that cable replaced.

Have you used a LAN Tester to check cables? They can be bought cheaply enough.
If not could you get a network cable instaler to check your network?
For a small fee it could save alot of time. Chris

Thanks for the suggestion Chris. I will pick up a LAN tester and give it a go. Probably wouldn't hurt to have one on hand anyways.

The other way of conducting a quick test is to upload a CD to Sooloos using Control:Mac and check Network Utility (in Apps -> Utilities) while doing so. In the Info tab you'll see the Send and Receive errors and any collisions ... change cables and/or switches until the problem stops!

This approach does have the advantage of being free.

I gave this a run and it showed zero send and receive errors or collisions. However it took 20 minutes to upload a 646Mb CD

My reference for time is that it has always been this slow since this is the network setup I have had since I installed the unit 4 years ago. If others have a much faster upload time than I clearly continue to have an issue in the network somewhere.

20 mins is way too long even for a Sooloos rip.
If you just import pre-ripped files then this is counted in seconds not minutes to import.

Cable or router......has to be one of these.

If you have an RJ45 crimp tool then maybe re-terminate both ends of the cable.

Borrow a switch and see if it makes any difference.

You must be close to solving this one.

Have you turned off wireless on the MBP when you do this? On my MBP, if I have wireless and GB connection active, it can sometimes take many minutes to rip. if I turn off wifi on MBP, it takes seconds.

Also, is your Netgear switch a smart switch? If so, is there any chance that port mirroring is enabled (not the default setting)? If so, make sure that you are not plugged into the monitoring port.