HD300 Issue - Strange

[Mike]

WMP has caused me more trouble than I care to think about when it comes to tagging and album art. It comes with a default setting to update data from the internet as allowed. I had changed my data to the way I wanted it but something kept changing it. For instance some albums come with a couple of different versions of album art. I used what was on my copies, but they kept changing to something different. It drove me crazy for weeks. I finally realized that every user profile on every computer that had imported that library into WMP could and was changing my data. I still use WMP for some things, but every installation I do, I disable that setting for each user.

[Mike]

Both of the last two betas took care of my problem of the FLAC files not playing after a while, but I've had spontaneous shut downs with both of them. One was after about two hours and the other was after more than 6 hours of use.

Mike

[Reddog58]

New to Sage and been going very slow. Got most things video working very well then started to add my audio folders.

Just put in a few flac and MP3 folders again thinking about going slowly. Now I find my 3 week old HD300 is having this issue where it will play music files, either flac or MP3 then the audio stops. Going to any video like live TV or recorded shows and all I get is a blank screen. I have to pull the power plug on the HD300 and things work again. If I stay in video I have no problem. Play music and I see the timer issue and if I go to another artist the problem starts again. I didn't see this post so I put in a support request. I am on the latest beta and firmware for the HD300. Music playback has to work for me even if it seems to get less attention. Using Sage as a service but I don't have any of these issue if I play on the local box.

[davidjames]

Originally Posted by Reddog58

New to Sage and been going very slow. Got most things video working very well then started to add my audio folders.

Just put in a few flac and MP3 folders again thinking about going slowly. Now I find my 3 week old HD300 is having this issue where it will play music files, either flac or MP3 then the audio stops. Going to any video like live TV or recorded shows and all I get is a blank screen. I have to pull the power plug on the HD300 and things work again. If I stay in video I have no problem. Play music and I see the timer issue and if I go to another artist the problem starts again. I didn't see this post so I put in a support request. I am on the latest beta and firmware for the HD300. Music playback has to work for me even if it seems to get less attention. Using Sage as a service but I don't have any of these issue if I play on the local box.

I had the exact problem. I opened a support ticket and they gave me detailed instructions to try and give them logs. For me, the occurrences were random and only happened after hours of playing. I just don't have the time to troubleshoot for them. If the problem becomes more frequent I might reconsider.

[Reddog58]

I guess this is one of my fears, that the music functions of Sage are just not any kind of priority. And I don't understand that if its a true media server. But since I am still learning I temper my frustration since I have found solutions for every problem I have found so far.

Reminds me of my first experience using Linux. If it wasn't for the user communities I would have given up on it too. I was close to getting another extender but I am not going to buy one just to test. Already the WAF is dropping since she is such a big music lover.

[davidjames]

Originally Posted by Reddog58

I guess this is one of my fears, that the music functions of Sage are just not any kind of priority. And I don't understand that if its a true media server. But since I am still learning I temper my frustration since I have found solutions for every problem I have found so far.

Reminds me of my first experience using Linux. If it wasn't for the user communities I would have given up on it too. I was close to getting another extender but I am not going to buy one just to test. Already the WAF is dropping since she is such a big music lover.

While the root cause may be music related, as you note, it also affects video, so I'd like to think it would be a priority.

If the problem is readily reproducible, maybe open a ticket and have them instruct you how to gather logs.

[_Demo_]

We haven't been able to reproduce those issues so far. Let me know if you find a way to easily reproduce or get a log that might have clues on what cause them.

_Demo_

[Reddog58]

I have keep reading as I am sure this is an extender problem since everything seems to work correctly on the Sage server side. I flashed the HD300 to the latest beta firmware. At first the flash failed so I pulled the plug and restarted. Did the factory reset and then installed the default released firmware. I followed that up and again tried the beta firmware which then flashed normally. Earlier this weekend I did try a reset and re-flash of the released firmware but that didn't help at all.

Since then I have been going back and forth between playing live TV and music files with no problems. I am tempted to try the release firmware again but I probably won't try to fix what might not be broke now. Now I have to hope this post is not premature and the problem reoccurs.

One thing I am seeing is in the non-extender mode I can play back the MP3 folder from the Sage local server but I don't even see the folders containing the FLAC files. I know this has been reported before but it seems the threads I have found stop before a real solution is suggested.

As another comment is there anyway to do a random music playback on the actual highest level music folder as opposed to going down a level below it. My folder structure is a dedicated single drive (F)-Music-Artist-Album-Songs.

[miloj]

There's a parallel thread on this issue here:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52999

The bug seems to affect both HD200 and HD300, and was introduced in v7. We seem to be at a stalemate with Sage since multiple folks have submitted logs but they don't appear to reveal anything, and it can't be reproduced by Sage. The fact that behavior isn't cleared up after the first power cycle (in the case of freezing at Sage logo) suggests something about the non-volatile system state must be changing.