The company I work for is a Audio Request Dealer. When I first started working with the Audio Request MP3 players I thougth they were really cool. The look and feel with the menus. You can tie into the server via a Lan connection and transfer music really easy. Pretty cool......Until I got burned today by one. I had five clients in 1 month have their MP3 players go down. Pretty much the same issue with the boot file going corrupt. That was a few months ago. Today I received an emergency call that one of my clients (already fixed their mp3 player) was throwing a party tonight and wanted help in creating a favorite play list. I have already shown her this but trying to show the customer service I offer to come over and help her set this up. Long story short - it crashes 1 hour before their party after I set up the playlist. Won't reboot...Really pissed me off. 2nd time in 1 year needing to be fixed.......My boss is even more pissed...Really fun to be caught in the middle of all this..Especially when you take pride in the products that you put into someone's house and making a system work reliably...It really sucks. So we are now possibly looking for something else.

Anybody think Escient is any good. I used to work with the Tunebase stuff a few years ago and I think I had even more problems..The Power Play unit i think topped all the troubled technology. I had nothing but problems with that stuff. I have only messed with 1 fireball unit and it seemed ok....i know any product basically based off a PC is goin to have some issues but a reocurring issue I almost would rather not do any MP3 player or PC based products for that matter (Except Crestron-that stuff rocks).

Any ideas or experience on any MP3 servers would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks

Sorry to hear about the problem. Sounds like a classic "Murphy's law" scenario. One thing I have found with Audio Request systems is that you have to stay current with the software upgrades. Especially if you are linked to the internet for CDDB. But, being a computer with a hard drive , it's not out of the realm of possibility that it can crash and burn. SO, I reccomend making some MP3 compilation discs that can be used in that kind of an emergency (played on their DVD machine). It won't be nearly the crisis you were faced with as long as there is some good suitable music for the event. On the service side of things I have found Request Multimedia to have one of the most responsive service departments in the industry. In fact, I used to joke about how pro active they were. Nobody can predict a disk failure, but how quickly the company responds to the problem is important.

I have been using the Imerge product for over a year and the only problem I have had is the cusomers router going down. I have had to have them restart a couple times. At least it's easy to walk through on the p hone..

My one issue with the Imerge product is that I feel that is has so many limitations, especially in the manner in which you browse for media, that I personally would make the distinction that it is not in the same class as the ARQ stuff as a media server. For CERTAIN clients, it is a great solution.

I think that there are many limitations to gravitating towards any single media solution. The market is so driven by communities other than our own, that investing a significant amount of resources in any one product could be a waste in the very near future... just a reality with digital media.

I hate Apple based solutions in that they are so far removed from what the C.I. industry really needs... on the other hand, they have such a large user base, you can't help but feel that they will be in the driver's seat for some time. I started to investigate Apple scripts in controlling iTunes platforms, but have found that it will lack the ability to get tight integration into "real" integrated systems. ARQ is still the hands down winner. On the other hand, when you can buy several full blown Apple laptops for the cost of even a single ARQ zone, it can be difficult to justify your own charges, especially when dealing with clients who are not afraid to use computers as the primary UI for navigating media (iTunes). (hey Apple, hire me as a consultant and I can turn at least the CI industry into your loving fans)

To add to the mix, Crestron has just released Windows Media Player support to their software suite. If it works, it could be another prime candidate for consideration. Windows stability, reliability?... on the other hand, cheap, quickly able to swap out, very easy to configure and find programmers to write custom applets. If you fear computer based solutions and don't feel comfortable, don't experiment on your clients. It is, however, incorrect to assume that computer based solutions are impossible to deploy reliably, for every major corp, financial institution, gov. entity, does in fact run on computers and quite a few windows machines to boot.

Going back to the ARQ line... if it is not meeting your needs... drop it. No manufacturer should be immune from having to deploy reliable and high performance solutions. We are not here to negotiate and take the good with the bad. We are in a position to take only the good. If you can't deliver, then don't ask for our business. Period, end of story, no excuses. There are those that will say with this design precaution, or that maintenance fix, or periodic service.... b.s. You want a box that you deploy and forget about, so that is what you should buy. My company(ies) are not in a position where they want to drop ARQ, but their biz model / support capabilities may be different than yours. I'm definitely not happy with some of the trends that I have noticed recently.

We strayed from Request once, in favor of Integra's XiVa server because of budget limitations. Lesson learned. Getting music into this thing was the worst ordeal I've ever gone through. In the end, I would have paid the difference myself to give them a Request. Fortunately, I got them to.

Their tech support was exceptional, but it didn't help. It was too limited & dumbed down. One speck of dust = jitter error = song ignored. They loaned us a powerloader, and after 10 days and 200 CDs, 75 had missing songs. And since individual tracks cannot be added to albums after the fact, we would have had to re-rip all 75 had we not called for an RA.

Hard drives are flaky... they're getting bigger & cheaper every month. And, like everything else, they're getting less reliable. I have a stack of old <1GB drives that are piled in a milk crate in my basement & still work fine. And I have 2 120GB drives bought last year that crashed within 6 months. The only solution is to backup the data. Request's zone units do this, and although expensive, can take the blame off you if all you do it offer it. Warn them in advance that hard drives are hard drives, and better safe than sorry.

Doug @ HomeWorks

mjj,

Sorry to hear about your troubles. The ReQuest server has gone through many changes in the last year or so. The power supply was a major change as well as the drives of late are not quite as bullet proof as the drives they used over a year ago. They are working very hard and have been to me and many other dealers very responsive to problems that WILL creep up on you in the business.

As with any complex component there can be problems from time to time. As far as the XiVA based servers, they have also had a good run and not many problems, and Escient seems to be coming around now.

We look at servers a bit differently than many AV dealers in that we want the ability to get the file directly from the server. So in this scenario the only currently available platforms that support this kind of functionality is MCE, and the ARQ. We just received a new sample IMERGE from XiVA that they tell us we also have this ability but we have not tested it yet so stand by on that issue...

So what does that mean when you are specifying into a job? Well we look for throughput, we want to see the specs on the magnetics, we want to know did they write the the TCP/IP stac or are they just using the stock stac? We want to know the real drive specs, how does the drive handle the spauns and what kind of latency is seen under stress. Do you have the ability to modify and or change the data flow through the buffers? Can you clean out the ping-pongs or must you wait for the garbage collection? As far as adding the files, MCE and ARQ are the most versatile of the current servers.

Right now the ARQ uses a Postgres database. While for a small amount of files this works fine, when you have a rather large collection of files, say around 25,000 it starts to become a bit unwieldy. A query in a database this size for a play list can take upwards of 2 hours with the ReQuest stock settings and memory. Of course there are ways to fix this but ReQuest would get nervous if you get that far under the hood. The good news is that ReQuest will be moving away from Postgres in the next hardware platform that they are working on now. This will not be available until sometime in November, but it should fix many of the common issues with the server. Another tip is to upgrade the size of the memory inside the box. The ARQ's come standard with 128meg, but if you go up to 1GIG or so you WILL see a huge difference, especially if you write code and need it to run in RAM, and not from the drive. I have ran tests and a response that would take 10 seconds with 128meg would take less than 2 with 1GIG. When you are building high end graphical user interfaces this is EVERYTHING!

Again I am very sad to see that you have had problems with the ARQ, god knows I have been in similar spots in front of clients before and that is no fun at all. I would still recommend that you continue to consider them for your server needs, even as you may try some of the other products. ReQuest is committed to this industry and I have found the people at ReQuest to be first rate.

Good luck.....

This message was edited by CresNut on 08/17/04 07:29 ET.

the MusicCast from Yamaha is really nice. they finally have in wall controllers that are reasonably priced too. Have used pc based AudiTron which is way user unfriendly for the non techno customer

Been using escient fireball products since they came out. Good stuff, the only thing i have to teach the client is how to hold the reset button down for five seconds, and that they will have to do it every few months. Getting music on them is great because they interface with a cheap changer and you can just let it go overnight or whatever. Support has been good from them and they interface with crestron and amx systems easily.

Escient is also working on Rev 3.0 of the Firmware which looks very promising. It will be a Free update to the units and will add long missed features that Request has now (And has had for wuite a while)

Check em out at Cedia. Shoul dhave a Beta of the new software on display.

As for Request failures though.... Havent had any lately. pretty strange. What kind of Power Conditioners/Surge surpressors are you using?

Maybe I jumped the gun a little bit on the Request stuff.

I am into computers. I know it is not if a Hard drive will crash it is when it will crash. But come on....Not even a year and the Hard Drive takes a crap. That really sucks...

It just really bums me out when you have an issue with a big client. We use the Richard Gray power conditioners on all of our racks. I hear the Richard Gray stuff is really good.(it should be for what it costs) The only issue with that one client that I can think of is that maybe they are having power failures. Maybe Request had a bad software update. Maybe it is my bad luck. I really don't know that. All I know is that the ARQ stuff really integrates really good in with the Crestron panels. The 2 way feedback stuff is really cool and maybe I am not in that big of a hurry to re-invent the wheel.

I will say that the new Requset DVD server stuff really scares me with the external video swiching and controlling of external Sony Changers. I am not in any hurry to try this out on any of my clients any time soon.

I will say that I wiil agree that Request has probably one of the best customer service departments I have delt with.

I have come to the conclusion that I think maybe we need to spec an external Hard Drive for each Client and back their library up in case their drives crash. Or maybe you really stick it to the client and sell them on the zoneable request setups that are outragiously expensive but they mirror each other in case the other one crashes you have a backup.

Thanks for the input....I really appreciate it.

You said yourself this is a big job and an important client. I'm presuming that this is a big $$ job, and it's clear that this is an important issue for both the client and you. Yes, the Request Zone's are costly, but I'm going to guess your client can afford it. You would not spend your money for one, but think about the benefits for your client if you installed one of those, made it another source on the system, and then was able to tell him that when the main one failed, just press another button on the remote that said "Zone 2 music server" and off he went again. And had his music collection backed up into the bargain. And had a second source from that same music collection when he and the wife were both playing music at the same time.

Think about it. Don't spend your money when choosing items for your client, spend theirs. Consider the value to them (not you) for what you provide, hardware and service both.

Richard Grays Power Companyies are NOT surege surpressors, They are Line/current Conditioners. They have no Brown out protection. That is one of the leading causes of Computer device failures. You should be using some sort of regulation or at the very least a UPS of some sort. These are Really Expensive Computers. They ned to be treated as such.

Exactly. I've been sitting on the sidelines regarding media servers of any sort. And Crestnut's post as quoted above validates my hesitancy. My reply is an observation and question as well. Perhaps I should post this as a new thread altogether, we'll see.

Ever since I left the cozy confines of a regional mid fi AV chain in 1999 (where I'd been since '88) I've been wiring networked homes (among other services). So from the start I knew that AV systems automation was headed for the internet sooner or later. Here's my problem...my business model (OK calling it that may be a stretch) is low profile, low overhead, one man band with a cast of extras (subs, specialists) that keeps me quite busy (anyone else who runs their custom shop this way knows). This leaves me no time to go back to school full time! Which is what I have wanted to do for some time. Though I understand in general the outline of the issues raised by Crestnut I couldn't really hold up my end of an intelligent informed conversation regarding those issues. Now, Bob or Eric could (my IP subs) but that doesn't really help me when it comes to evaluating new product, beta testing that product prior to introducing to customers or troubleshooting it when Eric or Bob are not readily available to yours truly. Not a unique situation.

There are plenty of resources available locally at post secondary level but there is not a curriculum written specifically to address my needs. Yeah Cedia's a good resource, but I'd rather put my education dollars into much more in depth university/college/tech school based course work. Question is where to begin and end. I've heard from Crestron guys that knowledge of code and skill to write programming is virtually mandatory, yet others have said it can be learned by doing. Obviously a thorough understanding of IP and networking is key. And it seems likely that knowing Windows inside and out is likely to become more and more vital as Microsoft wraps it cyber tentacles around the industry.

Anyone want to take a swing at writing a two year curriculum for this old analog AV dog that wants/needs to learn digital tricks?