HD300 Flac problem rears its ugly head again

[gdippel]

After installing the latest beta firmware I'm able to listen to flac music files, but occasionally after a period of time, say 1 hour, the HD300 turns itself off, remaining in "standby" with the red led. When I turn it back on, it re-connects to the server but when I try to resume playing music, I get a "Sage Exception 2" whatever that means.

The server end appears to be fine. After shutting down the server and restarting I have the same result, so I'm sure the problem is with the extender. Only solution I've found is to reboot the HD300 by unplugging and plugging in the power cord.

Anyone else experiencing this?

[Olias]

Yep, I feel your pain. Just noticed the problem during this Christmas season as I made a couple of Christmas music playlists for the family. Flac playback seems to ALWAYS have some issues as long as I've been using SageTV.
This time, whenever I play "enough" music (could be one hour could be less) the HD300 will lock up. A power off/power on from the remote does not fix it. I have to unplug the power from the HD300 and plug it back in to make it functional again.
I've been reporting flac errors to Sage support for a couple of years now. Looks like I need to send in yet another support request.

[girbim]

I gave up on flac files after a year or two of hoping things would get better. On my HD200, I never had any crashes, but it was ff/rew/next song/previous song/gapless playback control issues. I used dBPoweramp to convert the files to Apple lossless and things have worked much better. SageTV points to the Apple lossless library.

I use iTunes. iTunes allows one to switch libraries by holding the shift key (on Windows machines at least) when you start it. I created an Apple lossless library and then made a copy for my iPod Touch, which needs smaller files. If you swtich file type preferences, Apple will allow one to convert files from lossless to AAC. I then convert the songs by selecting everything and right clicking to select "Create AAC version". Then, I add the "kind" column to sort by lossless/AAC so that I can delete all lossless files. I also placed a copy of a song in each library and edited the info that the song name, album name, and artist name were all something like "_lossless". That enables me to tell which library I am in a little easier. When I change libraries on opening iTunes, I have shortcuts between each library. To add songs/albums one needs to do about the same thing by changing the file type preference depending upon the libary one is in and importing a folder that contains the new songs. I had to do about the same thing using MediaCoder for flac files.

Recently I discovered one can use the Remote app and an Apple AirPort Express connected to my stereo using an optical cable. This enables me to play music on my stereo and control it with my iPod. I play music most of the time using that setup. I believe that there is an Android app that is supposed to function like the Remote app. I still use SageTV if my iPod Touch is not handy.