Cocktail Audio / Yamaha Network Player Troubleshooting
“Press play and a different track would kick in…”
Recently we’ve encountered a few small teething issues with a network player setup and in the process of troubleshooting it have learned a thing or two. The devices in question are a Cocktail Audio X10 and a Yamaha CD-N500. It’s just as applicable to any Yamaha network player, for example the NP-S2000, R-N500 or the CRX-N560
The X10 is a CD ripper and network server for all the albums it stores on its hard drive. The CD-N500 is a CD player with network features built in that scans your local network for servers like the X10 and plays the content from them. This CD-N500 is controlled with a smartphone app on Android or on iPhones.
The problem we encountered went as follows: When using the Yamaha NP (network player) app to browse the X10s library, we would choose an artist, an album and then the track we want, press play and a different track would kick in. Choose one track, and it plays something else. But there was more to the problem. If we browsed by artist, then album, a different track would play but if we browsed by album first, then chose a track it played just fine.
After trying many small things, different approaches, cache clearing, resetting, updating, reconfiguring etc etc, our branch manager in Wellington had a bright idea. He queried the X10 for media info using a network playing app that can output log all actions the software takes and he found the cause.
Any album name with the ‘/’ character (forward slash) was being ignored by the player but not the browser. So these albums could be seen, but when you’d try to play it, it would immediately skip to the next album and play that instead.
We accessed the content on the X10 and editied the ID tags on the files, removing any forward slashes and punctuation symbols that weren’t necessary. After that, we refreshed the server and the app and it all worked perfectly.
“Any album name with the ‘/’ character (forward slash) was being ignored by the player but not the browser.”
If you are having any issues with a network player that are the same or simliar, edit the ID tags on the media server and make sure any odd characters (slashes or quotation marks etc) are removed and it might smooth things out for you too.
-Edwin Thompson- (Thanks to Jason for technical help)
Edwin
