[Morphology77]

Streaming is totally fine on my 1AM2.

That was not the original question.

It is fine right now but how it will be after few years?

Low performance SoCs dont age well on Android platform.

 

[kefs]

No, I installed Music Centre and allowed it to find my FLAC files ( 380 gig worth) it barely found 20% of the artwork automatically whereas Jriver which I use on my PC finds instantly, also UAPP finds automatically.

 

[Vamp898]

That was not the original question.

It is fine right now but how it will be after few years?

Low performance SoCs dont age well on Android platform.

In terms of Smartphones, that might be true, but not on DAPs.

Do you really think the SoC will, at some point, no longer be fast enough to play music with an music player app?

I would agree when people would argue about using Facebook/Instagram & Co. or playing games but Music?

I highly doubt that streaming apps will anytime soon suddenly need much more ressources to play music.

After using premium smartphones for decades (Xperia Z, Z4, XZ, 1 M2) i decided for a cheap midrange phone because even cheap midrange SoC are fast enough for everything.

I just checked my ancient Xperia Z4 from 2015 and even that one can still run Qobuz fine. My Xperia XA1 (testing device for AOSP) runs Qobuz perfectly fine with an MediaTek MT6757 CPU.

So i think there is no need to fear that these devices will not be able to play music anymore in their lifespan.

 

[Vamp898]

No, I installed Music Centre and allowed it to find my FLAC files ( 380 gig worth) it barely found 20% of the artwork automatically whereas Jriver which I use on my PC finds instantly, also UAPP finds automatically.

In my Music Collection it was able to find every cover image. But this is not the only app, it was just one example.

If JRiver and UAPP are able to find the images, why don't they embedd it into the FLAC? Are you maybe missing a setting?

 

[Morphology77]

In terms of Smartphones, that might be true, but not on DAPs.

Do you really think the SoC will, at some point, no longer be fast enough to play music with an music player app?

I would agree when people would argue about using Facebook/Instagram & Co. or playing games but Music?

I highly doubt that streaming apps will anytime soon suddenly need much more ressources to play music.

After using premium smartphones for decades (Xperia Z, Z4, XZ, 1 M2) i decided for a cheap midrange phone because even cheap midrange SoC are fast enough for everything.

I just checked my ancient Xperia Z4 from 2015 and even that one can still run Qobuz fine. My Xperia XA1 (testing device for AOSP) runs Qobuz perfectly fine with an MediaTek MT6757 CPU.

So i think there is no need to fear that these devices will not be able to play music anymore in their lifespan.

People have different expectations.
For some, fluid and stutter free user experience is paramount.

I am not bashing the device here just making sure that people understand that the user experience with these daps is not similar to high end smartphones which are priced lower in general.

 

[The1Signature]

In terms of Smartphones, that might be true, but not on DAPs.

Do you really think the SoC will, at some point, no longer be fast enough to play music with an music player app?

I would agree when people would argue about using Facebook/Instagram & Co. or playing games but Music?

I highly doubt that streaming apps will anytime soon suddenly need much more ressources to play music.

After using premium smartphones for decades (Xperia Z, Z4, XZ, 1 M2) i decided for a cheap midrange phone because even cheap midrange SoC are fast enough for everything.

I just checked my ancient Xperia Z4 from 2015 and even that one can still run Qobuz fine. My Xperia XA1 (testing device for AOSP) runs Qobuz perfectly fine with an MediaTek MT6757 CPU.

So i think there is no need to fear that these devices will not be able to play music anymore in their lifespan.

i wanted to write the same, but were too lazy

People have different expectations.

i understand that. But for a wm1zm2, where you have tidal and qobuz on it... Nothing changed over the years in terms of the cpu / gpu demand of the service itself. A little bit more beautiful here, other icons there... That's it. so the m2 is capable enough to manage that.

however, given it is android 11 and developers usually stop supporting the latest version after 4-6 years... It might be that once an android 16 version will be announced, tidal and qobuz decide "only" to develop and update their apps for android 12+ users. so you will stick with an outdated version of the app.

 

[Vamp898]

By the way i changed the windows settings for the Walkman to 96kHz 24bit, and now the lag is gone for the USB DAC

Check if it fixed something for yourself but VLC and YouTube are both lagfree now.

// Edit after using it for 5 Minutes, the delay of exactly 350ms came back... i don't know why it was on sync for a short time, but whatever caused it, removed it again xD

 

[andrewski]

i wanted to write the same, but were too lazy

i understand that. But for a wm1zm2, where you have tidal and qobuz on it... Nothing changed over the years in terms of the cpu / gpu demand of the service itself. A little bit more beautiful here, other icons there... That's it. so the m2 is capable enough to manage that.

however, given it is android 11 and developers usually stop supporting the latest version after 4-6 years... It might be that once an android 16 version will be announced, tidal and qobuz decide "only" to develop and update their apps for android 12+ users. so you will stick with an outdated version of the app.

I would hope that Tidal and Qobuz would understand that a lot of their subscribers might be on older DAPs. I would hope they'd support older versions of Android for a long time, otherwise risk losing their core subscribers. If the ZM3 comes out, I'll still be using ZM2 for as long as I can (ie; I can't afford another DAP for the rest of my life). I'm trying to make the jump to streaming myself. But I'm not ready. Local files kick ass too much

 

[Vamp898]

I would hope that Tidal and Qobuz would understand that a lot of their subscribers might be on older DAPs. I would hope they'd support older versions of Android for a long time, otherwise risk losing their core subscribers. If the ZM3 comes out, I'll still be using ZM2 for as long as I can (ie; I can't afford another DAP for the rest of my life). I'm trying to make the jump to streaming myself. But I'm not ready. Local files kick ass too much

Qobuz currently Supports Android 6, but yes, it makes much more sense to just use local files.

I klick the buy button in the shop, open the download app, it automatically starts downloading and i am done.

So i don't understand why i should use an streaming app that basically does exactly the same, but limits me. Most people who use streaming, download the music they listen to so they can listen to it offline. Why not just buy the music and have it as a FLAC file.

 

[MarkParity]

Just an FYI for anyone who is interested. I currently have the Focal Stellia on loan, its a surprisingly easy to drive headphone at 35 ohms and 106db sensitivity.

It sounds absolutely amazing, out of my inferior EU unit and even from the 3.5mm socket (no balanced cable supplied). I'd find it difficult to pick a clear winner between the Chord Hugo TT2 I'm also listening with, I mean I could but its not a night and day difference to my ears anyway.

My Amazon music subscription has lapsed but I listened to few tracks on Amazon music anyway and I could instantly tell it was using the Opus codec. So I swapped to Dire Straits - Money For Nothing 24/48 FLAC file to get a proper listen.

Sorry for the interruption I just had to post a comment about this pairing.

 

[Iggnasty]

Actually its the other way around. Placing artworks as a file is the method that was used 10 years ago.

Sony Music Center for PC (and lots of other apps) integrate the artworks into the files and even do that automatically. So if Albums don't have artwork, it downloads it for you and integrates it into the FLAC. Also all stores where you can buy music digital has the artwork included. So artwork as standalone files in the folder pretty much no longer exists and that is why a lot of new music players (not just the Walkman App) no longer support that.

Bandcamp even stopped shipping artwork files, they only have them included in the FLAC and nothing else

It decreasexs the performance of the player app drastically while increasing the workload on the developers for a feature that pretty much nobody uses anymore. That is why its not there

im sorry but the truth is that Sony Music Center for PC has a lot of room for improvement. Assuming that your statement regarding artwork is correct, why not do the same thing with the lyrics instead of saving them in lrc format inside the music folder and potentially decreasing the performance of the player drastically. Also, why would the PC app duplicate files when creating and loading playlists to the Walkman? I believe double music files will decrease the performance way more than a bunch of 300kb jpeg files. As far as I know Qobuz, provides covert art separately and imbedded in the music file when you purchase/download music from them. It hurts me say it, Foobar2000 gives you more flexibility, IMHO, Sony Music Center for PC needs a massive update and I’m not talking just adding support for new Walkmans models. My 2 cents/yen

 

[kefs]

im sorry but the truth is that Sony Music Center for PC has a lot of room for improvement. Assuming that your statement regarding artwork is correct, why not do the same thing with the lyrics instead of saving them in lrc format inside the music folder and potentially decreasing the performance of the player drastically. Also, why would the PC app duplicate files when creating and loading playlists to the Walkman? I believe double music files will decrease the performance way more than a bunch of 300kb jpeg files. As far as I know Qobuz, provides covert art separately and imbedded in the music file when you purchase/download music from them. It hurts me say it, Foobar2000 gives you more flexibility, IMHO, Sony Music Center for PC needs a massive update and I’m not talking just adding support for new Walkmans models. My 2 cents/yen

Agree, extremely outdated compared to the competition.

 

[Ghisy]

im sorry but the truth is that Sony Music Center for PC has a lot of room for improvement.

Just curious: is there a point of using Sony Music Center on PC? Can't you just drag and drop files to your player?

 

[Vamp898]

im sorry but the truth is that Sony Music Center for PC has a lot of room for improvement. Assuming that your statement regarding artwork is correct, why not do the same thing with the lyrics instead of saving them in lrc format inside the music folder and potentially decreasing the performance of the player drastically. Also, why would the PC app duplicate files when creating and loading playlists to the Walkman? I believe double music files will decrease the performance way more than a bunch of 300kb jpeg files. As far as I know Qobuz, provides covert art separately and imbedded in the music file when you purchase/download music from them. It hurts me say it, Foobar2000 gives you more flexibility, IMHO, Sony Music Center for PC needs a massive update and I’m not talking just adding support for new Walkmans models. My 2 cents/yen

I was just naming one example. As im on Linux most of the time, i don't use this software a lot. Its what i have installed on Windows because... i need something there and why not this.

But your both examples actually have no impact on performance. Neither the playlist files (they are stored in an sqlite database) nor the lyrics (they are only read when you actually play the song). So there is no performance hit by this behaviour, unrelated to if Sony Music Center is a good software or not.

Storing lyrics in an lyric file is actually the standard. FLAC doesn't have support for lyrics as you can see here

https://xiph.org/flac/format.html
https://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

fooobar2000 just ignores that and miuses an avilable free UTF-8 field for lyrics. Its pure accident and non-defined non-standard behaviour that this works. You can't blame Sony for using the official supportet way.

Sony Music Center is just an very basic application for the person who has nothing. It rips your music and can put it on your Walkman. Thats already enough for 99% of the people.

Most people just want their Music Player to play their music and nothing else. And when you rip your music, it detects everything automatically and embedds the coverart. It supports Hi-Res Audio for playback.

The original question was "Why does the Walkman not support album covers in image file format" and the answer is simple. That is an outdated caveman solution to an problem that was fixed decades ago and nobody needs to do this anymore and should not do this.

 

[Vamp898]

Just curious: is there a point of using Sony Music Center on PC? Can't you just drag and drop files to your player?

Its main feature is to rip music from CDs and Play Music from your PC. You don't need it if you don't do this