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Topic: Venting on UPnP Saga (Read 1713 times) previous topic - next topic
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Venting on UPnP Saga

I've gotten myself into a mess and am hoping some of the fine minds that frequent this site have some ideas. Bear with me .

A month or so ago I subscribed to Rhapsody Unlimited. My wife has an iPod, so I encoded my whole CD library to AAC using Rhapsody. (I would have used Nero, but wanted to convince my wife that it would be incredibly easy to switch from iTunes, so I used Rhapsody.)

Then I decided I must have a media hub so I could use Rhapsody from my stereo system. After considering Roku, Squeezebox, and others, I bought a D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520. (I thought it would be nice for home movies of my kids, which it is.) I just assumed (yes, I know what your thinking) that the MediaLounge, like Roku and company, played AACs, but turns out, no.

But no problem because the Rhapsody UPnP server appears to have a completely undocumented feature to transcode to MP3 on the fly. Right? Aesthetically disturbing, but good enough until the AAC firmware upgrade I'm hoping for from D-Link. Except that it doesn't work. Rhapsody just crashes, sometimes with no error, sometimes with an error related to xmencmp3.dll. (Part of the MP3 encoding process? Doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the file. And, yes, I've tried uninstalling Rhapsody, deleting all remnants, and reinstalling.)

After lots of fiddling, I have gotten the Rhapsody transcoding feature to work a little. My superstition is that playing the track once in Rhapsody proper once before trying to play it in the UPnP player makes the difference, but I frankly have no clue. In any event, the song will start playing--a big improvement--but it still crashes after a minute or two.

So then I bought Nero because MediaHome is supposed to transcode AACs for UPnP devices on the fly. BUT, MediaHome won't recognize the M4A extension an AAC. Nero's response? "I'm sorry to tell you, that M4A is not a supported file format of MediaHome. We only support the normal MP4. M4A is a special MP4 format of Apple." I've politely corrected the agent who wrote that e-mail (with a reference to the Wiki on this site). Anyhow, even if Nero MediaHome worked, I'd still have to switch back and forth between UPnP servers to play Rhapsody Unlimited songs and my own, which is a huge hassle.

I've been bombarding the tech support of all parties involved and gotten only unhelpful and often completely irrelevant responses. I could transcode everything to MP3 myself, but then I get double library entries in Rhapsody, which also show on the UPnP player. Then anytime someone unknowingly clicks on an AAC (I doubt there'd even be a way to tell the difference), Rhapsody would crash. Then I get accused of buying overcomplicated technology.

I could go on, but you've probably stopped reading already. If not a solution, please--at the very least--some sympathy?