Having not had a Zidoo box for a while, I’ve returned to the fold with a Z9S. Having previously complained about Zidoo’s Music program, which was up to version 3.0 on my X9S before I sold it, I have been pleasantly surprised by how much better is version 5.0. Most of the music I play using a media player is stored on my NAS in standard resolution (44.1KHZ) FLAC format and Music 5.0 now recognises most of these correctly, displaying the correct artist, album and track names. Even more welcome it also now reliably uses and displays my synchronised lyric files where present. It ignores repeated lines of text and trailing blank lines (which I use to scroll lyrics up off the screen at the end of songs) in the lyrics but those are problems easily solved. It sadly is still not gapless, a feature Kodi to choose one example, has had on all platforms for years. The other important aspect which Zidoo’s Music gets right is to output 44.1KHz tracks at the correct bitrate. Even the NVIDIA Shield which has been highlighted as a good Hi Res music player doesn’t get this right. Using Kodi on the Shield does however play and display song details for Hi Res FLACs correctly while this one area on which Music 5.0 still falls short. It plays my Hi Res tracks at the correct bitrates but misidentifies nearly all of them, thinking they are by the wrong artist or part of the wrong album and displaying lyrics for tracks that have never had lyrics. Finally I really like the rotating CD that Music 5.0 displays which is based on the album’s artwork. A number of other programs do something similar but they rely on someone having created a graphic of the CD disc art and putting it online, usually in Fanart.TV, from where the playing program downloads it. Zidoo’s approach is so much better. -- JB
Hey JB, I don't want to be a troll, but are you sure MP 5.0 is working fine? On my side it recognize 10% of my mp3/FLAC files. It never find the right artist or the right album, while all my ID are updated (and the same files work well with my previous player, Media Monkey, MusicBee or even VLC on my PC). The success rate is a bit better for artist recognition if I scan Album folder by folder (I have 6500 albums...) then make a rematch to enter manually the artist name (or album name: there is always one of the two missing). When searching for lyrics, 50% of chance the MP 5.0 app crashes, while finally none of the lyrics are saved (so you have to redo the lyrics search all the time) So either there is somehting wrong with my setup or either you are lucky?
Hi Tof, You'll see above I didn't say MP 5.0 is working fine, I said it's working much better than it was. I don't have anywhere near as many files as you do but most of my standard res FLACs are now recognised correctly. I guess it boils down to the tagging and metadata embedded in the files. I've mostly used dBpoweramp and EZCD Audio Converter to rip my CDs and always check the tagging is correct using MusicBee, which is the music player I use on my PC and laptop. These days I usally use Kodi and the CU RC Lyrics plugin to download new lyrics. This has the capability to save any lyrics it might find in the album's folder, on the NAS in my case. Most of the lyrics found this way have mistakes either with the words or the timing if they are synced lyrics. I then copy them out and correct the mistakes before saving them back to the album's folder as LRC files. Correcting the lyric files is not a quick process so I haven't done that many yet. But once they are correct and saved back then MP 5.0 displays them correctly. I have seen MP 5.0 downloading and displaying incorrect lyrics for either instrumentals or songs for which I have no local lyrics and these are indeed usually wrong. For instrumentals I therefore try to make new local dummy lyric files to stop MP 5.0 displaying incorrect info on the screen when playing these tracks. So yes, MP 5.0 is way better tthan MP 3.0 but it's nowhere near as good as MusicBee or Kodi or probably most other music playing programs which read the metadata correctly. Plus it only recognises one of my Hi Res FLAC albums and either ignores the rest completely (ie they don't even register in MP) or mistakes them for some other album and artist. It's a shame ZDMC doesn't allow passthrough of audio data when playing music files which would allow us to use that instead. Although I still might not use ZDMC because it's not compatible with the Aeon MQ8 skin I prefer with Kodi which works really well with synced lyric displays. -- JB
FYI All my album folders are named: Artist Name - Album Name Each album track is named: 01. Track 1 name 02. Track 2 name etc etc Any featured artists on a particular track are not included in the track name so no Song name feat. Guest. Tags obviously need to match the album, album artist and track names. Each album folder includes a folder.jpg of the album artwork. Lyric filenames need to match exactly the song with which they are associated. Eg to match the first track above the lyric file would have to be named 01. Track 1 name.LRC Hope that helps. -- JB
I'm not using this folder/file name structure as you. Only Artist/Album/file names, and I won't change because the screen of my Shanling M0 won't be able to display so long file names. All my metadata is done using both Musicbrainz, Musicbee, or Mediamonkey. I'm just asking for the basics with MP5.0 and because I like this device I really would like it works fine. I can't buy a Cocktail Audio X45 which seems a far better device for music (dedicated to that only) because I bought this Z1000 already, The CA X45 is too expensive and it doesn't display lyrics in standard mode. And I love to display lyrics because I'm not a native English guy and it allows me to at least understand what Mick Jagger is saying when playing Paint in Black (lol) I've just posted my top 5 requirements for MP5.0 in the other post you made. However on my side, my Hi Res files are all played without problem (except crashes sometime but crash also with simple mp3), and it is why I'm forcing myself to use this app rather than ZMDC or any others. Actually it is why I've bought this device (My previous Himedia Q10 Pro was better for image quality in my opinion, but I'm more using the player for music than movies)
