Just in case anyone is interested, I thought I'd post an update to my
ongoing Bluesound support saga. For the opening chapter, see 'my post'
(https://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?106981-Bluesound-Node-2-vs-SBT&p=876540&viewfull=1#post876540)
on the first page of this thread.
Last October, I attended the Toronto Audiofest, where I found myself
speaking to a representative for a Toronto-area store that sells
Bluesound. When he attempted to give me the Bluesound sales pitch, I
recounted a condensed version of the problems I'd experienced with my
Pulse 2. He expressed surprise that I'd gotten such poor service from
Bluesound customer support, but admitted that the software wasn't very
good a couple of years ago, when I bought the player. He said that it
had improved a lot since then and suggested that I try using my Pulse 2
for streaming again, to see if my connectivity issues still existed.
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I did just that. To start, I temporarily
moved the Pulse from my living room to my office, where my desktop
computer is located. By doing this, I was able to connect the player
directly to my router, rather than going through a powerline network
adapter. As a result, I discovered that the player was able to scan my
library much faster. While not as fast as LMS, a full scan of my music
files ran two or three times faster than it did with the powerline
network adapter. After completing the scan, the player worked as
advertised. Whenever I selected something to listen to, the Pulse played
it without problems. When I returned it to the living room and plugged
it back into the powerline network adapter, it continued to work with no
connectivity issues. Clearly, something had changed. I have no idea
whether it was a firmware update to the player, a Windows update, an
automatic update to my router, or some combination of all three. The
important thing is that it finally worked correctly.
But then I realized that something else was wrong. The total number of
songs in my Bluesound library was about two-thirds of the number LMS
indexes when it scans exactly the same files. Further investigation
revealed that many albums were missing, and that many others were
incomplete, with some tracks missing but others included. Even more
puzzling - each time I did a Rebuild Index (the BluOS equivalent of a
'Clear library and rescan everything'), I got a slightly different
number of tracks. On top of that, I discovered that if I followed a
Rebuild Index with Reindex Music Collection ('Look for new and changed
media files'), it would add some of the tracks missed by Rebuild Index.
If I kept doing the Reindex process multiple times, it would eventually
index everything.
So I opened a support request with Bluesound, assuming that they'd
actually be able to help me this time. Four frustrating weeks and many
red herrings later, the support rep I was dealing with finally admitted
that she had no idea what the problem was. She'd eventually realized
that the player logs she'd been examining contained multiple error
messages about failed file mounts, but she didn't know what was causing
the errors. Her solution was to close the support request, and to tell
me to contact them again if the problem recurs.
A couple of days later, I got an e-mail from Bluesound asking me to
evaluate my customer support experience. I selected the 'not
satisfactory' option and explained why. That was a couple of weeks ago,
and no one from Bluesound has gotten back to me.
In the meantime, I've gone back to using the Pulse 2 as a
DAC/amp/speaker for a Raspberry Pi running pCP. Whenever there's an
update to the Pulse 2 firmware, I'll try again to see if it's able to
index my music files properly, but I'm not going to waste any more time
and effort with their customer support.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Pattison's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64464
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106981
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