ZIDOO Music 3.0 coming soon!

Have to be patient dude ......
Dont want it rushed out and more so full of bugs .

At least they have giving us the heads up its coming some time soon .

 

"Coming some time soon" in Chinese is very similar to using the word "mañana" in Latin American Spanish. The translation and interpretation of western people would be "tomorrow" which in fact often is not the case. My interpretation living there for longer periods is more something like "Don't worry I am working on it it will come some day".

The X20 was coming soon too when first announced but next that took a full year.
I was extremely surprised a first shipment date was given by Futeko for Z9S and Z10 (4th of October). I expect it to slip a few times, but anyway "very soon".

 

Tried the new ZidooMusic Player 3.0 (zidoo_music_3.1.6.apk) which is optional to be installed. It is really an Alpha as stated in the sense that many things still work only partially or do not work at all. But overall it looks impressive with good functionality in the make combined with still an intuitive setup.

What works seems also to be fairly stable even more so than Beta ZidooMusic Player 2.0. This with the notable exception of the scraper which crashes frequently and strangely misses to find most of the songs within correctly found albums. The core player works for me reasonable well using MP3 or FLAC as the format and the file browser to get a dynamic playlist (current folder) running.
No CUE sheets for DTS-CD and no SACD support with HDMI set to RAW.

Update2:
Dynamic online Lyrics lookup: This nice feature is always on. It does find a reasonable amount of correctly matching songs. A problem is that it matches also similar titles of other artists which are mostly entirely different songs. I would mask these. If desired one can always do a manual lookup which is also available as a feature.

Available from the same pop-up menu is the sound equalizer. For me it does not work but that is probably due to bypassing internal audio processing. As I would not use it anyway not an issue.

What is missing completely (maybe an idea for ZidooMusic Player 4.0) is streaming audio services. My recent Onkyo AMP is doing a really good job there so not missing that myself.

Update1:
Indeed SACD ISO and DSF after switching HDMI to 2-channel LPCM both work and do so also correctly at 176.4 Mhhz. Only RAW needs to be fixed. Set it to AUTO for the time-being as a bypass which works too.
Prefer this release above Zidoo MusicPlayer 2.0 already now as is, not going back.

 

I have to wait till they release new FW for X10.

 

Anybody know where to get the remote app? If it currently exists.

cheers

 

What do you mean with remote App? There is not really such a thing and Zidoo may be blamed for using the wrong wording here.
Works identical for version 2.0 and version 3.0

There is a web-server page on the Zidoo player which can be accessed by any browser acting like as a remote control in functionality.
One can use any OS on any platform with any size screen to access the Zidoo at its IP address:9528 (=port number) as long as it has a web-browser. That is nice isn't it? They do the same for OpenWRT by the way.

Was confused about that initially too, now that everybody moves to dedicated APP's which is not always that smart.

 

thanks for the reply, I was trying to use an app called remote rc.

when I enter the web address I get asked for a password.

Is there a default password? dont think i ever created one

 

First time you access remote control you should be ask for setting password, if you forget or it ask you one you can reset remote apk in android settings/apps/remote delete data.
For LUCI (openwrt) default username root password blank, you will be ask when accessing openwrt to put a password to secure openwrt.

 

many thanks for reply

got it working now

looks like still need telly on when listening to music though

 

Good for you!

Use Music Player 3.0 with JBL Speakers using BT or via AMP with my TV turned off most of the time. Everything can be controlled via the remote just fine. What are you missing?

 

As stated before, the music player is Alpha statement yet.
I make a trial with this.
Nice GUI, clear without complexity.
It scans my NAS music folder and find 28500 almost tracks.
At the Artists, it display 26 only and the Albums 160 only, but the files are all.
Please, add the "Browse of Folders", it is very useful for a large organized music collection.

Another issue is the USB Audio.
USB Audio has enabled in quick settings menu but never (all the fw versions) make to work as usb audio streaming to a DAC.
I have tried on DAC's with XMOS and ATMEL usb chips.
At the same time other add-on software like "USB Audio Player PRO" on X9S, streaming the audio via usb very well to the same DAC's.

 

yes, the scaper is in real Alpha state. Known and reported by me too. We need to wait for the next version.

 

For me it crashes in scanning the music folder, how can i investigate the problem? (With NFS earlier than with SMB, so maybe its a timing problem?)

 

It always crashes with music on any source including HDD. It is an Alpha version!

 

hm, i'm the only one getting a popping every time a track stops and another one when the new track starts ? sound over spdif

 

Never seen that one. Not using SPDIF myself.

 

Yes I get that when playing FLAC tracks using Music 2.0 from an internal HDD. I've not tried with an SSD instead.
I do not get this artefact when playing the same tracks over the network from my NAS.

 

Just tried updating to firmware 2.1.14 (which went fine) followed by installing Music 3.0.
It may be an alpha version so some issues are to be expected but to me this version is much worse than Music 2.0.
For a start it insists on carrying out it's own scraping of my main Music folder and not only totally ignores my albums each of which are in their own sub-folder, it goes on to assign what it thinks are the correct Artist and Track Title to each song it finds. Most of these it gets wrong. So I no longer get a nice listing of my albums with all the correct tracks within I get a totally new list of albums and artists many of which I've never heard of. If I try to play one of these newly labelled songs I find it's actually one of my album's songs but it's shown with the wrong artist and wrong album name.

Then for lyrics for quite a few of my albums I have carefully transcribed the lyrics and saved them into LRC sidecar files. Music 2.0 displayed these perfectly with the correct lyrics displayed at the correct time. Music 3.0 appears to completely ignore my LRC files and looks for it's own guess as to what the lyrics are which it then displays as the song plays. Most of these are completely wrong. A big step backwards.

As far as I can see the only way to get back to Music 2.0 which works pretty well is to do a factory reset so that's what I'll be doing next. The only issue I actually had with Music 2.0 was that when playing either from an internal HDD or over the network it's not gapless which is a basic feature that so many music players fail to get right and which spoils a number of albums which have tracks which merge from one to the next. Kodi and therefore ZDMC get this right fortunately.

 

The core player itself from 2.0 was far from stable this has been improved. The other things mentioned i have seen all as well, but it is labeled alpha for good reason. I hope it won't take ages to get things improved.

Music Player 3 has 2 additional problems:
- Some DTS-CD tracks produce only noise.
- Playback may stop suddenly to produce sound. The player

 

Since we are talking about the music player 3.0, is there anyone who has proper playback through usb connection in DAC?
I wonder about this because it never worked through all of the player and fw versions, but with other software like USB Audio Player Pro the reproduction is fine.