Most important is gapless playback. Any serious music playing program must have this feature and as far as Zidoo Music is concerned implementing this feature would hopefully get rid of it’s current feature where, on my Z9S at least, with all filetypes it does not reproduce the first second or so of every track. Get the genre recognition working. All of my correctly tagged tracks of all formats are currently shown by Music 5.0 as having a genre of Other. None of my tracks have obscure genres eg I have tracks with genres of Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical etc. And finally enable Zidoo Music to better recognise hi-res tracks. Music 5.0 doesn’t yet acknowledge the presence of any of my 24-96, 24-176 and 24-192 FLAC demo tracks which are available as free downloads from the 2l.no website. -- JB
First, I own a Z1000... it sounds not to be the most frequent player here. So about MP 5.0: #1: make file tag works (for FLAC and Mp3 files). On my side, it is not only genre but track name, artist or album names that aren't recognize. Recognition rate is maybe 1% or even less. All the app I'm using on my mobile phone or PC recognize these tag (all my files have tags made using Musicbrainz). I have to make a rematch manually file by file to have just the 3 basics info song/artist/album. And twice since after a rematch you lose album name all the time. So rematch for song name/artist, then edit manually for Album name. A nightmare!!! With >19000 files, it is a bit boring... I did already for 100 songs... then gave up. Note that I also realized the internal hard drive is recognized as a USB hardrive only on my Z1000. no idea if it is a standard usage. Maybe that a reason of my tag recognition low rate? #2 navigation All my files are regrouped by artist folder, then album folder in the artist folder. But the user interface doesn't propose album/artist sorting. It is artist or album. If you choose Artist, it shows tracks randomly (or alphabetical order? I'm not sure), not regrouped by albums made by this artist as it should do. While sorted by Album, it is only using the alphabetical order with Album names, it doesn't sorted by Artist names first. Never find the option to do it, if exist (I doubt). So all your files are mismatched, Artist or Album display is useless (except if have only one album by artist!) All basic player apps propose at least this kind of sorting (I'm even not asking for genre, year, file rate, or more sorting..) #3 the gapless feature yes of course. +1 #4 finding lyrics that doesn't create a crash of the app. Everytime I'm trying to find the lyrics, 50% of chance to crash MP5.0 (not the hardware), then going back to the main menu. The "funny" thing is I can go back to MP 5.0, and play again the same file where it stopped. #5 playing a file can also makes crashes. Actually if you look at the time bar of the player, it has a lot of glitches/freeze. Sometime I see a delay of 15 seconds before the time bar is updated (and the disc picture rotating too). More than 15 seconds: the app crash. No idea if it is due to the Hardware or the software, but I don't have that issue using ZDMC Except that, the sound quality sounds to be there, I like to play my 96khz or higher FLAC files, while the Z1000 is plugged on a FDA amp through COAX.
1) Tags on FLACs and MP3s not recognised: On my Z9S if you list by Album then it finds all my standard resolution FLACs and MP3s correctly. Listing by Artist is a mess - see below. 2) Listing by Artist, which I’ve not tried previously, only lists approx 10% of the tracks in my library and for approx 50% of them it gets the artist and track names wrong. Strange that it can’t get this right when if you list by album they are all there and have the correct artist and track names. 2) Listing by Album, indeed can’t be further sorted by Artist, just by Album name. Maybe Zidoo will add it in future as long. If so let’s hope it doesn’t mess up the album listing. 4) Lyric search: I hadn’t realised it was possible to do this in Music 5.0 but now I see it can be done via the 3 dot menu. I wouldn’t do it this way because as we’ve already seen Music 5.0 has little chance of finding the correct lyrics. If I want to find lyrics for a particular song I’ll do that via a Google search. Regardless of how you find lyrics, most of the ones available on-line have mistakes so will need correcting before being put into use. This takes time especially if you’re going to sync the lyrics to the song. 5) Time bar and/or rotating CD not progressing smoothly: This is not something I’ve seen on my Z9S which is connected to my A-V receiver via HDMI. Maybe this is an issue with the Z1000 box? Finally my hi-res FLACs are played at the correct sample rate but they are only listed in the Media Center not in Music 5.0. Selecting one for playback in Media Center then launches Music 5.0 to play the track at which point it displays the wrong artist, wrong album name and puts up either the wrong lyrics or lyrics for an instrumental that it thinks is some other song. As long as it continues to do this I’m not prepared to use the Z9S to play my hi-res tracks. I am of course aware there are other apps that can play hi-res tracks but for various reasons I don’t like any of the ones I’ve tried so far. -- JB
Harry, I don't think so. I'm not in front of my Z9S at the moment but as far as I'm aware the Zidoo Music player, of which 5.0 is the current version, is only for playing music. This it can do from either a plugged in USB device, a NAS on your LAN or if you have a Zidoo with an internal drive bay it can then play music from that drive. Other apps are of course available on Android that can play web radio and online streams. I don't do either on my Z9S so if you want to know what's recommended I suggest you start a separate thread on that subject. -- JB
