"Official" Olive Thread Opus 4, Opus 6, Melody 2, Olive 2, Olive 4/ 4HD, 06HD - Page 66

Sigh...
You can find all that is there to it in this thread.

Marc

Yesterday i was so brave to rename my sub-genre Medieval to Old Music, expecting to say goodbye to my Olive for all the time that it would take. I could vividly remember the agony that renaming Chambermusic to kamermuziek had caused. It took several days then!

Again, I took the plunge... and was up-and-running a few minutes later.
Maybe the number of tracks was much smaller this time, but I reckon Olive have changed that.

Marc

A simple maybe silly question: if in the future i will upgrade to a new model (ex 06) from my 04hd, will i be able to import my 04hd backup into the new unit?

Yes: I upgraded from 04HD to 06HD and did the backup myself: ran into a few problems but that was with earlier firmware: the backup process with the new firmware seems much better

alternately Olive will do the backup for you but that means sending your old unit in and waiting 1-2 weeks for the new unit

Maybe this message from Olive causes some confusion in this regard:
Incremental backup functionality is now available (creating incremental backups will only be possible with one Olive server).

Marc

seems like a pretty solid process

when you connect an external drive, the pop up menu gives options for incremental backup or restore

In fact, I just upgraded from the 03HD to the 06HD, taking advantage of the Memorial Day special that Olive offered on the 06.
I received the unit yesterday, did an incremental back-up from the 03 (running software version 4.20) onto a portable USB hard drive, and then loaded into the 06.
Took some time, but the process was extremely simple and flawless. Everything transferred, including internet radio stations that I had persoanlly loaded the URL's for, playlists, everything.
Note that the portable hard drives need to be formated as FAT32, per Olive's instructions.

Nice job. But please keep in mind that 'everything' is kept in a tiny sqlite database, but the rest, your music is elsewhere. Nevertheless I'm convinced that the backup of 4.2.0 IS far superior to the old one.

Marc

Just the other day, I had again some bad luck with one of my Olive's. It had played some music without a hickup, but suddenly the sound was paused several times, and Olive Opus showed I/O errors.Refreshing Maestro and Opus yielded in 404 not available messages, and the screen itself did not react anymore.

I restarted the unit, but it did not reach the start screen with the green Olive logo.
By examining the disk, I saw that the boot-flag was missing from sda2. Normally the second partion has this flag marked, so I gave it the flag back, and by Jovis, it started up again!

I stil wonder how it could have been damaged, in the midst of playing some music, but I guess, I will never know.

Having opened my 'production' Olive, I thought it being time to feed it with the rips of last month, most of the Mercury Living Presence cd box I had bought recently. Routinely I checked the partitions of my work Olive, and repaired sda1 again. The other partitions did not show errors, but the first always does.
I had done this before, but now my work Olive did not start anymore (!?).
I had not seen this behaviour before, and maybe it has something to do with the recent updates 4.1.7, .8 or .9. For sure the first partition contains some 'secrets' from Olive, which makes it difficult to clone the disk.
None of my old tricks to overcome the problem succeeded.
So, I reverted to the official Olive recovery procedure. Now my pc is copying the data from one of my backups onto a working version of a recovered Olive disk, while I still have the original, not booting disk untouched. It started last night at 23h and it will be ready at 21h, that means it takes 22 hours to copy all the music.

But in my opinion, it should be necessary to copy just the first partition with the secrets, a very small job. The intelligent disk copiers I know of, all want to repair the filesystem before copying.
Again, i will have to study the old life-savers dd, ddrescue, or dd_rescue. So far my newest experience.

In short, an open Olive does not show an open Olive.

Marc

I see that (finalyy) Olive is also readin/responding on this treat.

That good news, because Olive Cusotmer support does not ansver any questions at all. I have tried several times, never got any response. Seems company policy: do not answer email from people outside the US. European customers dont count.

So I have two questions to Olive Care:
1. Whay does customer support refused to answer any email? (btw: I have heard this from other people too).
2. Is the Olive 4 now declared obsolete by Olive, or can we expect future updates to work on the Olive 4 too?

regards,

Hi Wolfert,

It's simply not true that Olive never answers any emails, I got several responses to my questions, and I live in the Netherlands.

Your 2. question is my question too. I see several improvements for my Olive 4, and if the updates won't come anymore, these will never be addressed.
If the next update also is for the HD-models only, we'll know.

Marc

My experiences with Olive’s service center are similar or more precisely :

I am really convinced that they put aside most questions .

I called and mailed for help several times as I got my new Olive in 2010. But I never got any useful reply even any solution for any question – one example, which was the only time ever Olive Care sent a mail back to me:

1.) On Sept. 11th, 2011 I sent a mail to Olive Care because my new Win7-homeversion-Notebook isn’t able to show any cover art in Maestro, no matter if Win-firewall is on or off – while WinVista-Desktop, iPhone, SafariMac and MacBook in the same WLAN could do this.

2.) Answer from Olive one month later:

Von: Olive Care [mailto:care@olive.us]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 6. Oktober 2011 17:17
An: xxx
Betreff: Olive Support

Hi Mathias,
I'm looking into this issue with our software team and hope to have more info soon, but can you confirm which Olive nit you have? Is it the O4HD, or the Opus 4? Thanks.
Take care and let me know if I can help you with anything else.
Best regards,
_____________________________________

Olive Service Team


3.) My answer:
Do 06.10.2011 22:18
Hi there,
thank you for your friendly contact !
To your question: I am using the Opus 4 with the newest system software .
Regards
Mathias

4.) My reminder:
Sa 29.10.2011 17:34
Hi there,
could you tell me if there is a solution in sight ?
regards
Mathias

5.) Last try:
Di 13.12.2011 15:03
Hi there,
I think, you forgot my question !?
Regards
Mathias

As always before I haven’t heard a peep from them again- is that what Olive calls ‘we save your music’ ?
I think it’s just a cool slogan from their Marketing Department but not a real business model.

Don’t understand me wrong: I know that not every question is easy to answer.
But I think it’s very disrespectful to play dead or ignore customers – especially when those customers bought a € 2000,- music server from that company !

So I hope I will never be put in a difficult position with my Olive – I practiced that I’m living in the European diaspora of Olive’s world – and there is no helping hand provided by Olive !

regards
Mathew
Edited by Uthlande - 6/19/12 at 12:44pm

Hi,

I am a new member from Germany. Hello to everybody.

If I try to contact Olive via official contact information shown on their webpage noone answers my request.

But I have an US and an German contact. This two persons are very quick in reponding. And both reply in german.

So there must be a problem in getting the mails to the specific persons. That is very poor.

Greetings from Frankfurt/Main

Mathew, I always thought that, provided the Olive has a defect, you can go to the dealer where you bougth the product. At least if you have the normal garantee.

Marc
Edited by mumsoft - 6/19/12 at 12:28pm

Hi Marc,
I also thought so before I talked to my dealer and Microsoft customer service :
As a matter of fact he’s an ordinary HiFi-dealer and only knows few about IT. He suggested me to send my equipment to Olive – but that should be the last solution for me, I rather would downgrade to WinVista and keep my Olive safe at home ;-)).
Microsoft customer service told me everything’s alright with my Win7-installation.
But I agree when both sides told me that there seems to be something wrong with the functional interaction between Maestro and Win7, because MacOs and WinVista show artwork via Maestro in the correct way.
So I tried to get help directly from the Olive technical service and was pretty confident when I got the first (and at last only) reply from Olive. So far, so good ….
…. after leaving me alone in the rain , I will buy an iPad which should be my preferred editing client in future.
Thank you for your dedication and greetings from
Mathew
Edited by Uthlande - 6/18/12 at 12:01pm

Olive will be loosing the battle.

I first had a great Music Server: Hifidelio. Great hardware concept. Very innovative. Good software. But it did not progress enough, so it went obsolete.
The I bought a Olive 4.
Again: great hardware concept and good software.
But l'Historoire se repet (History repeats itself): not enough progress.
The software has hardly changed in 2 years. The iPad app is still version 1.0 after more then 1 year. The Android app same thing: no updates.

And the hardware? We now have a 4HD and a 6HD. I agree: some progress. But nothing real gamechanging: my Olive 4 with an external DAC does exactly the same. And the 6HD is, in my opinion, complete overpriced.

But in the past 2 years many new entrants have come in the music server market. It is not Sonos and Logitec anymore. It is many other hifi manufacturers, both low and high end.
Olive should use its advantage of being first (with a serious music server) and blow all other away. But they don't. They progress extremely slow. This way they will be the Hermsted (=producers of the Hifidelio) of next year.

To add insult to injury, their csutomer services sucks. If you have direct contacts, it seems you get answers. But if you try to reach them through the office channels: bad luck, Their service page promisses "Questions answered, reality it that you will (hardly) ever get a response.
And that simply means that existing customers (like me) are not likely to buy again from Olive. I paid serrious money, do not get any answers from Olive. My player (Olive 4) is made obsolete without any announcement, communication of whatever. And I did not see any real progress in functionallity in 2 years. (what would not have been a problem if the Olive 4 was perfect, but it isn't.).

Olive: I still want to give you the benefit of the doubt. But PLEASE start with communicating about the future developments. What is there to expect? When will their be new iPad and Android apps? And real new fucntionallity on the Olive? What can we expect in the near future? Or is Olive already dead?

Hi Wolvert,

I agree with your opinions. Hardware wise there is only the way up to more resolution, so more potent DACs inside a new Olive, a bigger screen, and newer ways to save the music (SSD's and the like).
But as you stated, a newer DAC can be bought separately, and it has no real advantage in my opinion. Higher resolution than what the cd gives us, means just a bigger dynamic range than the staggering 96dB a cd offers. (http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html), NOT more details, NOT more music.
In fact, the best DAC they could build in, is the one you can find in your obsolete Olive 4. I think you don't agree, but you have never heard what it CAN do (and you are still invited to lend it your ears, you are 40 kilometres away from it).
Nevertheless, most people won't agree with me, so a bigger and better DAC would eventually be applauded to.
A bigger screen would be nice, but it should also give more information; the titles of the albums and compositions are cut off, and no more that 26 characters remain, without a way to scroll to the rest of the information. (And several .... and lots of unused space too). That is way to little. Maestro does this job far better.
I asked for Dutch several times. I complained about the constraints in searching. You can't get at the music with ftp, you can't login, and yes, the aps seems to be frozen after release.

There IS a better way to deal with these problems, just Olive has to recognize it. Make the Olive Open Source.

It is all Linux inside, and I guess most of should be open source from day 1, only a small portion could be proprietary.
Once open source, this would attract several clever people (including me), to make it a better Olive. And the company could concentrate on the hardware, with bigger screens, 'better' dacs and other modifications.

Dear Olive, Open Source is the way to go.

Marc
Edited by mumsoft - 6/24/12 at 11:52pm

I have had two units over 4 years.

I'd like to say the units were perfect but they were not.

I have no complaints in all manners by which things were handled.

The problem I have now is I am very dependent on the machine and really like it.

Follow the protocols and all is good.

I wish I had the technical knowledge to get into some of the more intricate software backs some of you are doing aside from the machine backup.

Regarding progress I think they are doing fine. Its more important to keep the machines running good than keep coming out with new features. What we don't know is how the new offerings from other companies are working thru their issues. We assume "the grass is greener on the other side" with new competition but that might not be so.

I think a big upgrade will be when the economy of solid state drives can replace the existing drives. I know there are some alternatives now but if we can get to a Terra soon it might be worth it.

Having bi-annual firmware upgrades to fix the bugs and improve things as they are has been great. Just being able to have it hard wired to the internet and the machine finding the updates is a great feature. Sure its not revolutionary but think how wonderful this feature has been. I have an oppo blue ray and its had no glitches due to the firmware being able to keep up. It was very stressful back in the day to down load an upgrade and load it. If it went wrong it was bad.

Regarding the screen size, its not an issue as I hardly ever use it. Maestro and the other program to replicate the screen on my computer is just fine. The app on my iPhone is a fantastic feature as well1

Is it perfect? Hardly but what they have works and its more important they get that right before "moving forward".

The only issue I have is making discs for my friends. It burns slow and does not provide any track information.

Its a small issue and not that important.

Keep up the good work Olive!

Thanks Nalod, I like your post.

Zbrett, I'm not in the position to relate the GPL to what Olive gives us. It's an American company and so they must have some lawyers in the room.
What I do know is that several companies that made gear with Linux inside, have decided to publish the source code because the license urged them to do so.

I have an Asus NAS with source code, which after being published could be bettered a lot.

I have two Olives, and I like to transfer the files from one to the other, without the need to backup & restore, and without the need to open the unit. If the data directory would be accessible one could do so easily.
It's just one of the many possibilities that could become available.

Marc

Hi everyone,

I have an Olive Opus 4 with several thousand songs (FLAC) I imported from my computer a while ago. I’ve been trying to recover these files but so far I’ve had some issues. First, I did a backup with an external HD and tried decompressing all .tar** files using 7-Zip but the only file it could decompress was AudioLibraryBackup.taraa. Actually, it got stuck toward the end of this file; a message was displayed stating one of the FLAC files in it was damaged. After that, I followed gareth67’s advice and concatenated all .tar** files into a single file. 7-Zip worked fine up until about halfway when it again said a file was damaged. I’m now trying to backup one more time using DIGINOTE’s tip to include an empty folder on the HD to avoid a flat backup. Any suggestions on what is going on or what I should do differently? I would appreciate your help.

Regards.

I like the Olive because of the all in one architecture and ease of use. What I never liked is the prorietory software and the unreliable backup and restore system. When you make a backup, it creates 2Gb files (FAT32 limit) with a taraa, tarab etc file extension. These file only include the songs, so you'll have to do some extra work to organize them into artist/ album structure. I had the same problem with damaged files. If you do a backup, attach the backup drive to your PC and look at the file extensions. If you have a file without the 5 digit extension, the restore will fail at that point. I finally gave up and used XBMC to import the albums to a folder on my PC. I then arranged the albums in Artist/ Album structure and imported them to a new non-proprietory music server. I gave the Olive away and miss the front panel display but not enought to ever buy another one.
Edited by PGMMA - 6/27/12 at 10:45am

Hi PGMMA,

Thanks for the reply. So you actually used XBMC to import all those .tar files? I have just downloaded XBMC but I'll have to wait until my back up is finished...another 36 hours or so.

No, it actually transfers the album music folders to the folder or external HDD (connected to your PC) of your choice. They can be organized as you want and will play on any device (that plays FLAC in my case). You wind up with for example with a folder called Abbey Road/ then the songs. By the way, I've heard that the newest version of XBMC no longer works with Olive. If that's the case get version 10.1 because I know that works. If you have a very large collection, you'll have to transfer 100 or so at a time because it crashes when trying to do the whole thing at once. Just launch XBMC, the hover over system and a menu will appear. Click on file manager. Add source on the left side and browse for your Olive. Choose the album folder. On the right side add the destination folder (or external HDD) on or PC. Now highlight a group of 50 to 100 albums on the left and right click and copy to your destination folder on the PC. Repeat this until your done. Now you'll have your complete ripped music collection that will work on any player or server that supports FLAC or whatever format you use. If you need more complete instructions, let me know and I'll post again.

Thanks a lot PGMMA! I really appreciate it. Well...please forgive my ignorance but should I connect my Opus 4 directly to my computer and then transfer my files or should I first finish the backup and then transfer the .tar files? I have about 700 GB worth of music (all FLAC like you) and would be really happy if I could restore these files as my main hard drive failed a few months ago.

Please complete your backup and leave your Olive connected to the network. You don't have to deal with the .tar files. When you start the transfer with XBMC, you'll have the actual music album folders and you won't need to do anything with them at all like decompressing etc.

Hey thanks again! I'll wait a few more hours until the backup is finished and then I'll let you know about my progress.

You're welcome. I'll send you a private message with detailed instructions tomorrow.

Hello PGMMA -
I recently upgraded to the 06HD from the 03 version during Olive's Memorial Day special. I like the display and build quality of the 06, but frankly it is hard to hear the difference in a direct 03/06 comparison test, at least with our system. In other words, the 03 sounds quite good. Our kids could discern the difference on certain tracks with regularity, so it may be my 4+ decade-old ears. oh well. The 06HD runs slightly warm with the linear supplies and the larger hard drive has slight but noticeable vibration when you hold your fingers on the case. There is also a very slight 'hiss' (not electronic) from the unit, a little louder the our iMac in comparison. This is non issue when playing music, but surprising. In comparison, the 03 runs cool, silent, and vibration-free. So, unless you get a big discount on the 06, I would recommend the 04HD or 03HD. Perhaps only consider the 06 if you want to pay extra for the solid-state drive.

I downloaded the latest XMBC (version 11.0, 'Eden') and it found the 06 immediately in file manager, with all albums, artwork etc. Needless to say, I was impressed. I need to experiment more to copy them into a new directory (external HDD for example); the usual right clicks did not seem to work. Thoughts?

I like the option of having my music library open-source even though I like the Olive system. I have placed our modest library on both the 03 and the 06. The 06 is home; the 03 is in our summer cabin, so the system works nicely enough for us.

OK, managed to copy from the Olive 06 onto local HD (Mac system). Copy went thru fine, files sizes are a perfect match. However, the file type on the Mac is a 'document' so I cannot initiate playback from within XBMS. it no longer recognizes it as a music file. So, is there a file copy setting I missed?