It seems that the vast majority of comments in the various WDTV Live threads have only to do with the video playback & networking aspect of this great device. Little is mentioned about the audio/music side of it, hence this thread.

There are two "annoyances" that I have with mine.
The first, which is driving me absolutely bonkers is that I almost always listen to my music collection in Shuffle Mode. I love starting up the WDTV Live & just let it play a mixture all day long. Except mine won't do that. It will play for a while, and then just stop.
It could in as little as 5 minutes, or after an hour. But it always does this. All my music files are either .mp3 or FLAC, all tagged using Tag & Rename, all with album art. Bought a brand new WD Green Caviar 1TB sitting in a Thermatake BlacX drop in external dock. I've also tried several different USB powered WD & Seagate drives, different USB ports, rebooted, re-set, etc. Support has tried to be very helpful with suggestions on what to try, but they say they've not had this issue reported or have seen it themselves in their tests. And yet....it happens every single time here!:mad: Yesterday it actually played all afternoon long, & I was estatic!! This morning, I've already had to restart it 5 times & finally gave up & shut it off.

The second one is the displaying of the music tracks. WHY can't they show on the screen in alpha-numeric order? (viewed in All Music) If you go by an individual album, yes, they are fine, so it obviously CAN sort that way, so why not in any mode you choose? In either Thumbnail or list view, it's the same - all mixed up.

On the video side , I'm VERY happy with how it performs in how I use it.
I just wish that it could be a truce MEDIA player & do Music as well. If they could add replaygain & gapless playback of music tracks, this thing would be near perfect (& oh yeah , find a way for mine to stay playing in Shuffle Mode until I decide for it to stop.)

So I'd like to read other people's impressions of the music playing side of the WDTV2 as they start using it more.

Thanks for this info. I've been contemplating getting either a secon Asus O!Play or a WD Live. The absence of gapless playback is one more strike against the WD Live (the Asus doesn't have it either).

Actually I haven't found ANY media player that offers it.
Yet my little (Rockboxed) Sansa E-280 portable music player can do both (replaygain & gapless):o

Why not something we can use with our home stereo systems? :confused:

the original WD TV handled my audio collection better than the WD Live.
I 'played around' with it for a few hours..which for the simple tasks I was requesting of the device was a few hours too many,imo.
(who needs a $100 headache)

No, I am not willing to reconfigure my LAN and security/registry settings for this gadget.
I can currently share audio via folders, winamp, windows media center, orb, xbox360, itunes..etc..etc.. but the WD Live was not playing nice.

After tweaking the registry, I could see the shared folders and cue the music.
The thumbnail and data info was shown - but no flac playback.
On different reboots of the device sometimes I got playback..then it would crap out.

I saw basically everything the original poster mentioned - very disappointing.

For gapless audio to be completely ignored as a feature (as its been on the wishlist for a year or so) WD was sending me the message 'to forget it'.
IMO, the original WD device would make a better audio device than video - as it was limited with the hdmi 1.2 to begin with (and other hardware shortcomings)

the network share fail/the audio playback fail had me packing the device for return the following day.
it couldnt offer a feature that I didnt already have from other hardware/software solutions.

I do wish to see gapless flac playback offered for WDTV/WDLIVE.

but with the new Atom processor desktops arriving and the new dlna receivers - why should I even bother 'wishing or waiting' :hmm:

but i still think its the right thing to do :D so do it!

Playing music files over HDMI, the first half-second of the first song is cut off. This did NOT happen with the original WDTV on the same receiver connected with the same HDMI cable to the same HDMI port, so it is DEFINITELY a problem caused by the WDTV-LIVE.

Confirmed with both network and local files, and both uncompressed WAV and compressed FLAC.

Not seeing any of that at all here, & I've tons of music files.
Played via an attached HDD, all play fine here.

Is your audio playing through HDMI or optical?

Hdmi

Have you double checked your cables? I've found HDMIs to be somewhat finicky, especially the stiff ones. Doesn't take much for them to move slightly & lose connection.
Are you playing them in Shuffle Mode or regular? If the tracks run together, as so many albums do these days, it may be the delay when switching tracks (which of course gapless playback would totally fix, if it was ever implemented)

The stopping during random play is something I haven't encountered yet...but then again, I haven't given enough time to a large group of songs playing on random play...I'll try that at see if I get that. As you may know, I'm still trying to get the album covers to display...may have to do some screen captures and post here to make sure I've got things set as they should be per song.

Anyway...I too love the music side of this box, I transferred my whole music
collection to the My Book 1 TB drive...short of an HTPC, I'd always wanted to do this. For me, this is like version 1 of a long long road to getting the visual and useability side of things up to where I envision them...Like the differences between windows media player 1 and the latest version maybe...Among many other enhancements I'd like to see, adding songs to the now playing queue is high up there...I like grabbing a wildly different set of tunes on a whim day to day. And adding them in a way that doesn't require a lot of backtracking to previous windows...for all the negative things people seem to dislike about windows, their media player I liked for the ease of use from the Library tab...maybe something like having the thumbnails on half the screen and double clicking to add them to the player on the other half of the screen, things like that...

ps - I've got the whole collection on random play, and 10 songs in..still playing...

Thanks for testing it for me...I love being able to just turn it on on the weekend & let it play thru the whole day...if only it would.

I notice a delay for up to 4 secs when selecting a song & hitting enter.

Also , I have to retype in my Pandora account info each time I start up my WDTVL, doesn't seem to hold onto my login info. Gets to be a pain.:(

I'm beginning to wonder if this WD Green Caviar drive I have has some sleep setting where it drops to hibernate after a time for some reason? Perhaps could explain why Shuffle Mode stops...although I've had same issue using other WD & Seagate USB powered drives too.

I'm totally disappointed with my WD TV Live as an audio player as well. I share my music from my PC and never have any issues listening to all of my music in shuffle mode with XBMC (on the original Xbox!). I have 912 albums (14943 tracks), all meticulously tagged MP3 files, organized in individual folders with a high quality folder.jpg. I don't have embedded album art because I think it's a waste of space.

Although WD TV Live displays the album cover while browsing, if I play an album, it doesn't display the album art. No big deal, except that this is the only playback mode that works for me. If I hit Play on my entire My Music folder, it works for a minute or two and then throws a "This folder cannot be accessed" error. My next thought was to create an Everthing playlist and try playback that way. If I keep the playback mode set to Normal, I can hit Play on the Everything playlist and it quickly queues up all of my music tracks. If I try to set playback to Shuffle prior to launching the playlist, or after playback starts, it basically freezes after playing the one track.

Once I understood that there is no Media Library through a network share (unlike XBMC), my next thought was to try installing Tversity. One bonus with Tversity is that it displays album art for every track, with only a folder.jpg to work with. When I try to listen to all music in shuffle mode, it almost seems to work! It sorts all of the tracks alphabetically, so the first track played is always the same, but the second track is random. Unfortunately, Tversity goes into a "one track repeat" mode and will only play the second track over and over again. Annoying, but this may get fixed on their end eventually. I should probably go post an error report on their forums.

It's frustrating because I am pretty happy with the WD TV Live overall. Right now I have it hooked up to my 50" DLP through component and optical to the receiver. I'll be getting my HDMI switch (Monoprice, FTW!) this week. I've noticed that DVD MPG playback is noticeably softer and slightly less vibrant on the WD TV Live compared to my TiVo HD, but hopefully the HDMI connection will help. HD playback looks great. My new Monoprice switch separates digital audio out of the HDMI to optical or toslink, so it'll be interesting to see if the first half second of audio playback cuts out on my end.

I'm a little bummed out that the WD TV Live doesn't completely obviate my old XBMC box, but it looks like I'll be keeping it hooked up for audio playback only. It's hard to do without Shuffle mode, crossfading playback and Last.fm support. Maybe the WD TV Live will catch up down the road with homebrew/mods...

I'm totally disappointed with my WD TV Live as an audio player as well. I share my music from my PC and never have any issues listening to all of my music in shuffle mode with XBMC (on the original Xbox!). I have 912 albums (14943 tracks), all meticulously tagged MP3 files, organized in individual folders with a high quality folder.jpg. I don't have embedded album art because I think it's a waste of space.

Although WD TV Live displays the album cover while browsing, if I play an album, it doesn't display the album art.
It would if you had embedded art in the files. :D

But yeah, for me Shuffle Mode is very unreliable (& also very frustrating, as that is what I want to use it for most of all) WD claims it works fine <shrug>
I've also noticed a big jump in relative volume between playing audio tracks & video files. Audio only is MUCH louder, to the point I've had to jump for the remote when switching from videos to music, as there's a 5-6db difference

Audio only is MUCH louder, to the point I've had to jump for the remote when switching from videos to music, as there's a 5-6db difference

I know early firmwares for the WDTV1 did an audio boost. It was fixed in an early revision.

I checked the Live by going back and forth between a CD from my Oppo DVD player and a ripped WAV playing through the Live (this was through optical, not HDMI). Even got my trusty Radio Shack sound meter out <grin>. My finding is that there is NO audio boost on the Live, at least through the optical port.

I was on the phone with WD support for a couple of hours today. I was able to get to a helpful level 2 support guy. While on the phone with him, I made him aware of the Shuffle issue with a network share. I even made various sized playlists while on the phone with him for testing with Shuffle mode. My playlist with all 912 albums of course chokes the WD TV Live. The playlist with 20 albums was very snappy moving track to track. The playlist with 100 albums still worked, but took about 4 seconds to go from one track to the next. The playlist with 250 albums chokes on Shuffle mode.

He took a bunch of information about the hardware I was using and seemed to think there was a memory problem. It seemed to me that there is plenty of memory on my PC end (2GB) and plenty of memory in the WD HD Live, so I'm guessing (not that I would know!) that the problem probably has something to do with the amount of memory set aside (buffer?) by the programmers to hold playlist information. Or, heck, maybe it's even a CPU issue on the WD TV Live. I'm assuming that it never occurred to anyone at WD to test out a big MP3 library.

Anyway, the problem is documented with a trouble ticket and the tech support guy told me he would deliver the information to the higher ups personally. Well, who knows what will happen, but at least I tried!

Also, I created a thread over at the TVersity forums (http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=36471) mentioning the track repeating Shuffle problem using TVersity. I figured it couldn't hurt...

hmm..interesting. I'm connected thru HDMI, and for comfortable levels going from playing a stereo (non DTS). avi, or watching regular TV, then switching over to music via WDTV, I turn down the gain on my Panasonic AVR about 6-8 db, according to the readout on the receiver. There shouldn't be that much of a difference. Would be nice to have a gain button on the remote.
In the v.1 threads, some ppl complained of hearing distortion, but I never experienced that.

I was on the phone with WD support for a couple of hours today. I was able to get to a helpful level 2 support guy. While on the phone with him, I made him aware of the Shuffle issue with a network share. I even made various sized playlists while on the phone with him for testing with Shuffle mode. My playlist with all 912 albums of course chokes the WD TV Live. The playlist with 20 albums was very snappy moving track to track. The playlist with 100 albums still worked, but took about 4 seconds to go from one track to the next. The playlist with 250 albums chokes on Shuffle mode.

He took a bunch of information about the hardware I was using and seemed to think there was a memory problem. It seemed to me that there is plenty of memory on my PC end (2GB) and plenty of memory in the WD HD Live, so I'm guessing (not that I would know!) that the problem probably has something to do with the amount of memory set aside (buffer?) by the programmers to hold playlist information. Or, heck, maybe it's even a CPU issue on the WD TV Live. I'm assuming that it never occurred to anyone at WD to test out a big MP3 library.

Anyway, the problem is documented with a trouble ticket and the tech support guy told me he would deliver the information to the higher ups personally. Well, who knows what will happen, but at least I tried!

Also, I created a thread over at the TVersity forums (http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=36471) mentioning the track repeating Shuffle problem using TVersity. I figured it couldn't hurt...

Very cool!! At one point along the development path of the WDTVLive, it was mentioned to me that there might be a memory leak somewhere causing the Shuffle problem. But they tried replicating it with the units they had in their test beds, but never saw it. I even sent them my ext drive with my music on it, for them to try, but it played fine for them. I have two Lives, they both punk out in Shuffle Mode (from an external drive, though , not thru network streaming. Hopefully they will find a solution. Eveything else works great for me, if they can cure this I'd be a happy Camper.

Do DTS WAV music files play on any model of WDTV?

Very disappointing. The ability to shuffle playlists and play my audio in general is important to me. Do any of the competing media players handle this better? I'm checking out the refurb PCH 100, but the Pandora is really pushing me toward WDTV Live.

Once I understood that there is no Media Library through a network share

Wow. How do you navigate to what you want to listen too, through folders?

Actually I haven't found ANY media player that offers it.
Yet my little (Rockboxed) Sansa E-280 portable music player can do both (replaygain & gapless):o

Why not something we can use with our home stereo systems? :confused:

XBMC on Xbox does replay gain and gapless playback and has done so for 5 years.... Also on the Apple TV as well or on my mac mini.

I know early firmwares for the WDTV1 did an audio boost. It was fixed in an early revision.

I checked the Live by going back and forth between a CD from my Oppo DVD player and a ripped WAV playing through the Live (this was through optical, not HDMI). Even got my trusty Radio Shack sound meter out <grin>. My finding is that there is NO audio boost on the Live, at least through the optical port.

Noticed this today under the new "pre-release" fw for the WDTV.v.1

"Resolved gain being applied to audio output that resulted in signal clipping"

edit: seems they glommed together infos from several updates into this one too. Gain issue was resolved a while ago.

Can you link to Pandora in Canada?

XBMC on Xbox does replay gain and gapless playback and has done so for 5 years.... Also on the Apple TV as well or on my mac mini.

Don't have an XBox (nor plan to), same for Apple TV. I'd just like an affordable priced media player that...just...plays...media correctly.

Strangely, running the WDTV.v.1 all day in Shuffle Play..working perfectly.
Same drive.

Any update on these issues? Particularly the shuffle problem and networked share media not being in the media library?

Is it possible that using Tversity or something would work around these issues?

I haven't seen anyone else report on seeing the Shuffle Mode stopping in WDTVLive playing from a connected USB drive but me so far. :(
Strangely, I connected up my WDTV to the same drive/setup that I have been having problems with using Live, but it played fine all weekend long.
So this tells me that it isn't a problem with the music files or what hdd I am using.

one question more related to the title than to the actual discussion:

does the Live! play DTS audio (converted to stereo or to smth else) thru HDMI if the optical output is not connected (nor the RCA ones)?

that is my biggest problem with WDTV1, lots of .mkv movies with only DTS audio which first have to be converted on my PC to AC3 or MP3, then merged back with the video ...

Windows 7 (or Media Player 12) has a 'Play To' feature that will allow you to play a playlist/album/song to the WDTV Live. This feature has worked very well for me - it doesn't shuffle, but you can shuffle the list before you select 'Play To' WDTVLive.

It acts kind of like a juke box, if you select additional tracks/albums/etc. and select 'Play To' WDTVLive, it appends them to the bottom of the list and plays them in that order.

Windows 7 seems to see the WDTV Live as a digital media receiver.

It is supposed to work with video, but several of us are having problems with that feature - the audio comes through, but no video is being displayed.

Internet radio any ideas on this. I am a big INTERNET radio fan. Really like the live 365 thing found a good station 128k sounds really good. WDTV live hardwired. Also have a Roku Soundbridge connected wireless played the same stream thru the roku and the sound is far better with the wdtv. Both going into the receiver optical. The roku is wireless B. Any thoughts why?

KevinSartori,

Regarding your "Shuffle" issues:

Try Twonky instead of TVersity - the WDTV Live shuffle works with it!
It always starts with the same track but a quick press of "Next" on the WDTV Live remote produces continuous random selection of tracks. Of course why we should have to go to these lengths to provide functionality that the WDTV Live should have 'out of the box' is the real question! It's the price for early adoption I guess.

new firmware released yesterday

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdfwdtv_live

Still no DTS-HD passthrough? meh, not interested.

There's another thread here on AVS about the WDTV as a music only player, where people have connected it to a stand alone DAC via the toslink out & gotten excellent results from it as sort of a "poor man's Squeezebox"

Still no DTS-HD passthrough? meh, not interested.

I am not sure what you mean no DTS-HD.

I am able to play M2TS with True-HD DTS just fine and the whole Christmas Tree lights up on my Onkyo TX SR705.

The unit can not decode True-HD or MA however it does bitstream it to your DEC which can decode it just fine.

Now I'm confused big time!

As a result of my Tversity / WDTV Live shuffle problems documented earlier I tried Twonky, and even paid for it which was silly as I soon found out I couldn't get on with it's (to me) clunky GUI.

So I went back to try Tversity again as I really liked the GUI and I now find that the Shuffle problem has disappeared..................................


So perhaps a full removal / reinstall might do the trick for anyone else with this problem.
and/or
I also did not allow the second install to carry out the system / firewall alterations it requests to do in the install procedure. I've no idea if that made any difference though
and/or
I had upgraded the WDTV Live to firmware Release 1.01.11 (11/16/09)

Good Luck!

firmware Release 1.01.11 (11/16/09) does not fix the DLNA push Video bug

Not sure what this has to do with the title of this thread..:confused:

I am not sure what you mean no DTS-HD.

I am able to play M2TS with True-HD DTS just fine and the whole Christmas Tree lights up on my Onkyo TX SR705.

The unit can not decode True-HD or MA however it does bitstream it to your DEC which can decode it just fine.

What I've been reading is that WDTV Live only bit streams the 'core' of True-HD and DTS-HD (really, only bit streaming DTS and AC3). HD, to me, means both HD audio and video. It's not a 'true' HD streamer if it only streams half of the HD equation..(HD video), to me.

Hi,

Can anyone please confirm this?

Does it bit stream the HD audio tracks? i.e. not just the core..

Cheers,
K.

What I've been reading is that WDTV Live only bit streams the 'core' of True-HD and DTS-HD (really, only bit streaming DTS and AC3). HD, to me, means both HD audio and video. It's not a 'true' HD streamer if it only streams half of the HD equation..(HD video), to me.

I have been playing with the Live for a few days and found that it does bitstream Dolby True-HD (which lights up on my Onkyo 807), but all of my DTS-MA trials have only resulted in the DTS "core" passing through. I have been testing various rips, but the "sample" rips page on this forum is good place to start with very small files...hope this helps,
-Cheers-

Has anyone found a great solution for streaming internet radio, particularly Shoutcast, to this unit?

I'm sort of doing it with Tversity, but annoyingly, I have to go to "RSS and Podcasts" part in Tversity on my WDTV Live instead of "Internet Audio" where I would expect to find it. Does anyone know how to change where it shows up in TVersity, or how I can get it in a more logical place.

I have a hard time getting my wife to use it because of little counter-intuitive things like that.

Hoping for some help.

I have converted some CDs to MP3 using iTunes. The WDTV Live shows Album Artwork for some of the albums but not for all. iTunes shows the artwork for all. I don't know if/what I am doing differently. How do I insure that the CDs that I convert will display their Album Artwork on the WDTV Live?