First, let me say that the DMP-A6 is a great sounding streamer DAC with high quality screen. I have the ME addition now, but started with the first gen A6. Last week, I sold an A6 ME to a local fellow. It didn’t take long for him to contact me to share his frustration with the UX/UI. Compared to other streamers like the BlueSound Node, the setup on this is not easy. But it is based on Android, so maybe it makes sense. Can we make it more difficult? It pains me to complain about a streamer DAC that sounds fantastic and looks great. But as a long time Mac guy working in the graphic design / web industry for decades, it blows my mind that the DMP is cluttered with folders that have nothing to do with music, and my biggest frustration is getting downloads from Qobuz organized on the A6 so that I can easily enjoy music. I just spent about an hour to download ONE album and having to go through the complicated process of being able to play. Between storage and SSD, and copying to other places in the directory and having to spend so much time doing it … it’s disappointing. I don’t care what computer platform you are used to between Mac and Windows …. I think we can all agree that today’s culture of technology has developed to the point of making things simple and quick. Actions are automated so that the user only has to select a few options and click away. The user doesn’t have to search for anything. The frontend of the process is simple and clear … Anything less than simple, easy, and fun … is a lost opportunity. For me, I can’t justify spending more money on the A8, A10 or anything beyond that when the UX/UI is the way it is now. I plan to continue downloading certain albums in the DSD format. That makes the SSD a valued feature of the unit. Let’s talk downloads. The process should be dead simple. Plug in the device (A6), and it should open on my desktop, prompting me to add files for download. Or better yet, create a folder on my computer that I select for my Qobuz downloads. I shouldn’t have to hunt for anything. Organize and manage files that I downloaded… Now comes the fun part. As it stands, I have added an album that won’t show up in My Library, Artists, Tracks … but I can find it on Storage and SSD. I made it a Favorite, and can find there, but when I select “Music” on the home page, I have to go hunt the album down in Favorites again. I shouldn’t have to hunt for my music, and I shouldn’t have to copy the files and add them to different folders in the directory. I admit that if I only stream music and NEVER choose to download music, I would be mostly thrilled by the interface since I wouldn’t have to do any of this backend work. But even the app on desktop/tablet has way too much “stuff” on it. I understand the desire to give consumers every possible thing under the sun, but let’s be honest. Most people just want a streaming DAC, or streamer. Most of the social posts that I see on IG all echo this disappointment. I’m sure many people here are already used to the process and it may make perfect sense. I simply want to bring this up from a 60 year old guy that loves music and gear. I speak for many others who are gravitating away from Eversolo to BlueSound and other units that offer a much easier process. Overall, I think the whole experience is cluttered and I really hope the dev team considers how the product is used and understand the end user. I am hopeful that over time this will occur.
Absolutely agree with you! There are various comments on the forums about the haphazard and illogical organisation of the menus and general UI. To address your particular point - been there, done that, "Favourites" only show up through file manager side menu and not in Music? If you navigate through Music, Albums and select one you can freely add individual tracks or all of them to a Playlist - great! However if you navigate to a folder for example using Files then you do NOT get the option of adding ANYTHING to a Playlist. This is hugely annoying as I have a multitude of folders on my SSD which I used to use as playlists on my previous device and it would be so simple if the "Add all tracks to a Playlist" was available so they would then be available in the Music section!
100% agree. I rip cds to my apple music library on my laptop. To get that music on the SSD on the Eversolo requires maybe 15 separate actions, and not one of them is suggested by the way the options on the screen is labeled. After 6-8 months of using the device I still have to refer to my list of commands to ensure I do them all and in the right order. It's crazy! Love love love the device. Hate the preposterous UI.
Get a NAS such as Qnap and centrally store all your music, videos, pics, etc. Then connect the A6 to it via smb drive, problem solved. I realize its more $$ spent but if you have other players in the house its easy to connect them to the NAS as well for music streaming. Qnap has the core Roon app if you ever want to explore that.
I actually have a QNAP NAS but I think maybe you miss the point a little? The DMP-A6 is marketed/sold/bought by me and others as a stand alone all in one server/streamer and it needs better software to fulfil this goal!
I get ya. They could improve that part of the software for sure. Others have worked around it by doing the work from a PC and then transferring it to the A6. Same complaints about ripping CDs.
The problem cold be solved with more SMB perfomance, should be easy, with all the computing power in the device …
If you use Windows you can simply open the SMB in the explorer. Then you can drag&drop your downloaded files into the music directory. I am using a directory "A" on the streamer to hold all the music. All other directories can be ignored. That works pretty fast and I can upload a few albums in minutes. (I completly control the streamer from the desktop using a remote control program I developed, no need for the APP)
Yes I have done that, trouble is they don't always show up in the DMP search function even after a rescan of the library
That could be due to the fact that they are not correctly tagged. The search mechanism is not based on file-name, but rather on the information about artist/album/title contained in the file's metadata tag... One important thing that comes to mind is, that sometimes, the tagging software used misbehaves in tagging the files; that is: uses different-than-standard tags; I have seen FLAC files tagged with an id3v2 tag, instead of the standard (for FLAC, that is...) VorbisComment. In these situations, when the interpreting software searches for the standard tagging style, it gets mistakenly told that the file has no metadata information... Just my 2c
You may well be right - most of my rips are from my own CD collection which were digitised using a Cocktail Audio X12 or an Innuos Zen Mk3 along with a few downloads from the web and are either in WAV or FLAC and I would not know metadata if it came and introduced itself. However both those previous server/streamer machines and various Fiio DAPs have never failed to locate ANY of my tracks/albums using a search function whereas the Eversolo will often not register their existence at all although I can use the Files function and navigate manually to them? I have rebuilt the library scan several times. Surely if other companies products achieve this essential function then it would be reasonable for Eversolo to provide the same, apparently standard, function. I expected better.
"Standard" when it comes to media search, is a big word... Those players you mention could have well performed a search based on file names alone, what the Eversolo is apparently not doing. I suggest you (re)tag your files and retry a library scan.
Yes, maybe I should have used "common" or "expected" instead of standard? Sounds simple - "(re)tag your files" but for 8400 odd files is it that simple, can it be automated, is there a magic program to accomplish this?
It can be, somehow automated, or at least made to run in the background while you drink a cup of coffee. There are tools out there that use the file's sound signature (or whatever it is called by thechs) to retrieve metadata from sites like musicbrainz. I cannot remember any of them, but maybe somebody with experience in the matter can jump in and pin a couple of them for you. (I rip my CDs, and set/correct/clean metadata in the very moment... I do agree that having to do this on a 8K files library is kind of willing to die, instead... Music Tag is one of them, but it offers both free and paid versions, so I cannot tell what it is, and is not, able to do, depending on the version you chose. MusicBrainz Picard also is a valid one, according to what I can read here and there. MP3Tag is also a good one. Both the above are free as in "free lunch". You may give them a try; you have nothing to lose, they won't damage your collection; just, eventually, throw an error if some file is not recognizable / fetchable, so that you migfht end-up tagging it by hand. There is also something like FooPlayer2000 (cannot be sure, but is looks like its name is this) Of course, these are valis=d if you are on a Windows box. For Linux and/or Mac I cannot speak (I do Linux, but don´t bother with this kind of software, as I do not need it - and I do not do Mac at all) Hope this helps. Kind regards, Al.
Many thanks for the informative and helpful reply - I shall do some investigation and yes I use a Windows machine - which unfortunately won't upgrade to Win 11 so that will be more expense when the updates stop this October! Better get started with a backup of the SSD content to the PC.
Wow, great, in a way to see I’m not to odd duck out there with my expectations. A new thing … I have some music that was in my Eversolo playlist that is no longer there. Bummer. I’m early on and will have to figure out the best way for me to organize before I commit to getting too deep … knowing I may have to start over again. But with the problems, I still love how the device sounds. I currently have the A6 ME connected to the AMP-F2 via Cardas Clear Cygnus interconnects (XLR) and it sounds nice. What is amazing me is that I have low cost Infinity RS 2001 speakers connected and they sound better than they have a right to. Today has been a solid day of listening. I needed to not think about the UI and adding music. I will say that using ROON was a cleaner way to deal with music and their radio stations are better. But I just don’t want to pay the additional $14 to use it. Maybe I’ll change my mind. I think that the team responsible for the A6 / Eversolo app are maybe too smart for their own good. I mean that in a good way. They are what I would call “power users” and like the complexity and “power” of what you can do. The problem is that most of us want to simply connect to our service (Tidal, etc) and listen to music. Secondary is to easily organize so that you can reliably and quickly find what you want.
"Secondary is to easily organize so that you can reliably and quickly find what you want." Absolutely - I find it incredulous that playing a track using the "files" route, the now playing screen does not give any options to add to a playlist or see the album or Artist! On the rare occasions it does show the little ... options in the top row it usually tells me "File does not exist" - how come it is playing it then? I have had several different streamer/servers over some years, Cocktail Audio X10 & X12, Cambridge CXN, Bluesound Node, Innuos Zen Mini Mk 3, Fiio M11S & M15S, and all of them have been much easier to navigate and create playlists from browsing files - the DMP-A6, forget it!
