new firm ware and cocktail audio confusion - confusion

It is all about who owns the rights to the name Cocktail Audio in the UK, and I'll leave it at that, as I don't know the exact details and I don't want to get sued. The products made by Novatron are now imported to the UK under the Novafidelity name, and the distributor is www.scvdistribution.co.uk/ The main website www.cocktailaudio.com has a list of all the distributors and dealers in each country.

It would seem that they are creating a more uniform version of the firmware, based around that of the N25, which is a network streamer, and as such would have to rely on the embedded metadata within a streamed music file. Something that the previous firmware versions for the CD ripping players didn't do, as they used a combination of embedded metadata and various additions/alterations to the Music files/folders on the attached storage. This was why you couldn't just copy music files to the device, they had to be imported, and the only program you could use to edit the files with was the web interface (webserver).

The new firmware versions do appear on the German and Italian forums first as they appear to be the beta testers, and have full admin support to report any early problems with the firmware before full release.

As the new firmware is still evolving I wouldn't expect a definitive manual or guide anytime soon. You can have a look at the details of how the new database works here: www.scvdistribution.co.uk/files/R1681_MusicDB.pdf

I can understand the confusion and frustration surrounding the new firmware releases, (I had an X10 right at the beginning) but I can see where they are going, and why they have changed how the database works. While there will undoubtably be a few problems along the way, the new database system and firmware should hopefully get rid of some of the old problems, like, loads of your music is now in the recovery folder, and the infamous white screen of death.

P.S. The next firmware version is apparently reinstating the backup function, although no indication of whether or not it will be incremental.

I would give firmware version R1721 a miss, as there are some large problems with it. So much so that the admin of the German forum has opened a special information thread to document all of the confirmed issues.

So far they are:

a) Playlists can be lost

b) Albums with the same name are saved together in the same folder (typical example Best of)

c) Exactly identical files in the same album mean that the last file "wins" and overwrites the previous one.

d) Files with a period at the beginning are not indexed.

e) Changes made to the TAGs via the web interface are lost if either a database check or a backup was not carried out before the update.

Hi chris123. I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to do here, but if you could clarify a few things.
It sounds like you have ripped some more CD's on the X40 and want to copy them to the X50, would that be correct?
What firmware version is the X50 using?

Hi chris123. This is a tricky one, I would have avoided firmware version r1721 as my post a few above suggests. The problems that it has introduced, merging same name albums and overwriting same name tracks likely will have affected you in some way. I believe the X40 didn't get the option of the new firmware version so luckily that will be unaffected by these problems.

While the idea of wiping the X50 and copying the X40 DB, would solve any album merging/over writing track issues (as the indexing numbers would prevent that) but if you had to reinstall r1721 for any reason, then It's highly likely that it would trigger the removal of the indexing numbers once again. Leading to the same album merging problems etc.

If you originally copied the X40 DB to the X50 and then installed r1721, then the album folders should not have a number prefix. So you could just export the new albums from the X40, to a USB stick and then copy them to the X50. You would have to be aware of any same name album issues, but apart from that it is probably the best option at the moment.

As you can see here, the problems are all to do with how the music files are laid out on the storage, and no doubt this is one of the reasons why the web interface is delayed. The current way of just using an album folder with only the album name just cannot work, the more common way of doing things (whilst still not perfect) is to use an albumartist folder with album subfolders. Which practically eliminates the same album name merging problem.

The bottom line here, is that I wouldn't do too much with the X50 until they have a proper firmware version that addresses most of these basic problems.

Hi chris123. If you are going to start from scratch and reload all of your music to the X50 from the X40's backup, then the quickest way to delete everything on the X50's internal hard drive, would be to format the drive. Upon reboot the X50 should create the "my music" folder which you would then copy everything into. As for the best way of doing this, I'm not sure, and your previous posts just refer to "uploading in the usual way" so I can't say how you did it previously. Does r1721 have a backup and restore option? As that may work, alternatively. Using the browser on the X50, locate the album folders on the external hard drive, select one and copy it to the "my music" folder. Check that worked ok, and if so you should be able to select a few albums at a time and copy them in batches.
Upon completion a reboot of the X50 should automatically scan the "my music folder" to index the database, or you could do it manually, Music DB/Music DB Initialization.
An Overview of The New Novafidelity Music DB System: www.scvdistribution.co.uk/files/R1681_MusicDB.pdf

As the new firmware has to be installed on devices that already have an existing music collection on them. One of the problems here, is the size of some of these, someone on the Italian forum reportedly has over 10,000 albums! The other problem would be the speed of the devices, they don't exactly have a great deal of memory or processing power, add in a mechanical hard drive and any changes that have to be made, will be done relatively slowly. If you consider that the new firmware essentially just moved all of the albums from the "DB" folder to the "my music folder" and then r1721 just removed the indexing prefixes. These changes to the layout are being rolled out in an incremental fashion. Partly in case there are any unexpected problems (as with r1721) and partly because, in some cases there will be a huge amount of folders/files to be processed. The fundamental changes that the new firmware is implementing are going to be more of a saga, than a short story. Just like my replies.
Edit: I have just noticed there is a public beta version of the P.C app (the successor to the web interface) on the German forum.

Hi chris123. It's interesting that the app is showing double tracks when the external HDD is connected to the X50. As you won't have indexed the external drive into the X50's database. Perhaps the app is directly reading the metadata tags, as mp3tag would do, or maybe it is showing the information that it can read from the folder/filenames. In which case one set of double tracks wouldn't show things like year or genre as they aren't in the filename.

Ideally the best way for you to transfer music from one device to another, would be to rip and tag on the X50 then copy to a USB stick and import to the X40. As the import function on the X40 would sort it's own folder/file layout for the old style DB.

Perhaps you could try the beta version of the new P.C. app. It is the first version, so there are a couple of reports of it crashing and it isn't fully featured yet, but it is supposed to be able to do the tagging function properly, which is all that you would need for the time being. I won't post the direct link to the download as it does just download straight away, and as this is a beta version the setup file isn't signed, so Windows will pop up the blue warning screen and your antivirus software will warn you about it too. This is normal as you wouldn't sign a work in progress beta version which will only be tried by a handful of people.

You can download the beta app from the German forum: www.cocktailaudio.de/forum/showthread.php?tid=5208
The download link is in the first post from the admin. Use google translate to read the comments about the beta version.