How is it possible to use Audirvana to play music?

The title is a bit provocative but honestly the first purpose of this SW is to play music, isn’t it?
It’s barely possible: there are period where things work, then suddenly, everything is messed up, no possibility to synchronise with the NAS, and play back suddenly stops.
Support? Which support? Never received an answer to my emails!
When I told my DAC manufacturer about those issues, he told me he was not surprised, there are many problems raised with Aurdirvana.
I’m starting from now on to look for another solution (Roon?) as I cannot rely on something that works from time to time.

As usual, I reply to myself:
I tried to remove the DB and restart the whole thing. It appears that the process of synchronisation starts but do nothing: the DB journal is still empty after 5 minutes and so is the DB itself.
Restarting the MAC for the nth time…

I finally sort the thing out by deleting everything (plist file and DB), restart the whole thing and checked the NAS and network.
It appeared that a remote directory was mounted inside the directory where the music is and was creating some issues.
At least, now, the DB is under reconstruction as I also noticed several cases where an album only contains a track when the whole album was in a single directory with many tracks.

It seems working now.
It’s a pitty there is no log of DB synchronisation so we could figure out what is happening. Maybe there is? But where?

It looks like the issues are mostly related to the NAS and your particular setup.

What NAS do you use, how do you access it (SMB/CIFS, AFS, NFS)?

I also use the NAS to store the music and permanently add new stuff as I rip through my CD collection. Never had issues you are reporting. Truth be told, I seldom play music while adding new stuff. Maybe that’s the key, don’t play music while the index is being rebuilt.

Also, mount each share as a separate entry in Audirvana.

Hi,

Thanks for your help. It seems you are right, issues seem to have their source either on the NAS or on network itself (need sometimes to restart the switches). And as you suggest, I mount each share separately, which is now quite easy as I only get one ;-). By the way, I find the DB building and indexing on the basis of metadata a bit excessive in terms of complexity, resources usage and problem management, when I would be satisfied with simple file browser to navigate into home made directories where music can be stored at my convenience.
Now that everything has been restarted and DB has been entirely rebuilt, it seems that the app is correctly working.
Nevertheless, and I’m not 100% sure the root cause is the same, I got from time to time some distorted sound coming out from my loudspeakers, which I already reported here in another post. I managed to temporarily solve the issue by unplugging and replugging the USB cable but I know that the only way to stop the problem is to restart the app. My DAC manufacturer told me he got many reports of problems due to the use of Audirvana with some specific DACs.
Anyway, it’s a pity not to have a log file where Audirvana activities are reported, so that we could easily know what’s going on.

If you prefer the folder based navigation, Audirvana is not that. You may want to look at alternatives, like Vox.

With the index based solution, you get some features, like search for multiple attributes. It’s a tradeoff you need to accept.

What DAC do you use? I’m curious at this point.

And fwiw, I have a lifetime Roon subscription but use Audirvana most of the time. Roon is a more complex system (needs a core server + UI clients) and has a different set of issues. The grass is not much greener on that side :slight_smile:
Once you have Aurdirvana up and running, I find it more stable than Roon (and better sound!)

Hi,
Thanks for the advice. Thing is that the indexing on multiple criteria and based on the content of metadata usually creates may problems: names not consistently spelled, number of categories exploding for unknown reasons. So, unless you create your own metadata, it’s quite difficult to have something really efficient.
I have a TotalDac machine which is awesome with respect to sound quality. Apparently, preference is in favour of ROON according the DAC manufacturer.

Thanks for that! I was about to consider testing ROON although I find it as you say a bit complex and expensive too. You are right in providing the info to prevent us from looking at too many places where sometimes grass is not greener. This is a so common mistake.

You might also want to try a different interface, SPDIF instead of USB. You might get better results.

I tried that but surprisingly results are worst than with the USB connection. Thing is that I have to use a network player with a SPDIF cable to the DAC, and use Audirvana to send the music to the player via UPnP.
Maybe you know a solution with a direct SPDIF link from the MAC?

I would suggest you try with Audiophonics Armature Hecate or Hecate LT:

https://www.audiophonics.fr/en/digital-interfaces/armature-hecate-xmos-xcore-208-usb-spdif-asynchronous-interface-p-11412.html

https://www.audiophonics.fr/en/digital-interfaces/armature-hecate-lt-usb-interface-spdif-xmos-xcore-208-asynchronous-tcxo-p-12798.html

The full Hecate version is obviously better. It has some signal re-clocking and isolation features the LT version is missing.

Not sure if the newest mac’s still have an optical output but I can use mine with a little adapter like this:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Toslink-Optical-Female-To-3-5mm-Male-Mini-Toslink-Plug-PDIF-Adaptor-ConnectorBSC/293107931228?hash=item443e98185c:g:3oEAAOSw5T9au2Y6

Ok I had the same problem upgrading to Audirvana 3 from 2. It seems that the procedure of updating the database has problems. As you dit, deleting all of the database and index and let rebuild all database solve the problem. After that, also modification in the monitored directory works well
Anyway as user we should receive better support, even if i am an Audirvana enthusiatic user

Heads up if you plan to use your Mac as your Roon server. The current release of Roon has a bug on MacOS (also reported on Windows NACs) where after a few hours of continuous use it abruptly transitions into high CPU usage (over 90%) which causes Macs to overheat. This is not related to network activity. When that happens, the only solution is to shut down Roon server and restart it, after which Roon runs normally for a few hours until the problem returns once again. This was reported to Roon a few months ago but as far as I know there has been no software fix.

Hi,
Thanks a lot for the info. Fortunately I managed to solved both issues that were not fully due to Audirvana itself. Since I switched the USB cable to another port the distorted sound did not come back and I can enjoy listening music without being stressed with a potential and sudden loss of quality.
So it does not seem I’m ready for Roon. With Aurdirvana I would like now to understand why a single directory containing a full album turns to separate albums in the Aurdivana library.

That’s great, a much better outcome than burning out your Mac. FWIW you also might have found that the SQ on Roon is a notch below A, although of course Roon captures more metadata and playback stats.
Re your album problem, that can happen on Roon too. On A you might try the following:

  • using your MacOS finder, open the album folder and look at it to make sure there’s no obvious problems with track names and numbering. if all looks good, then continue as follows
  • delete the album from the A album display screen, go to options - library, turn on the option to “rescan network folders at each start” (bottom of the “1st Method: monitored folders” section), then shut down A
  • move the folder of your problem album to some other place in your file system that A doesn’t watch
  • restart A, give it time to rescan its library database, then shut A down again
  • move your problem album folder back into the directory that A watches
  • restart A and give it time to rescan its library database.

Great you were able to sort out your issue!

Albums can also be split because of meta data. An easy way is to check is to look at the meta data for a few tracks in each of the albums and see what is different (can be Album or Album Artist or so). You can fix this easy using the Audirvana meta-data editor.
Just make them the same and Audirvana will group them back into one album.

You’re right: that’s great! Everyday we learn something.
Regarding the issue with metadata, you’re most probably right. I need to find the time to look at those data carefully to understand the reason why tracks are not at the place they should be, according to …me!
I also discovered you may have duplicated tracks when you have both individual audio files and cue files that point to the same audio files.

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