Things I have learnt from debugging two Brennan B2s

[Alastair Martin]

1. Most of my hassles were solved by replacing SD cards.  (One of the B2s spent some of its life sitting on top of a microwave.  Eddy currents, perhaps?)

2. The new software is better than the old software.  Upgrading is a good idea.

3. B2 won't compress if you have a browser window open looking at it.  (Think there's somewhere in the menus that would force that).

4. Regular use of scan disk helps, especially when pumping a lot of CDs.

5. The wifi dongle supplied is actually pretty good for signal - I did not get better signal with a dongle with a stick-out antenna.

6. Hanging the wifi dongle off a USB extension cable isn't a great solution to Victorian stone walls.  It just creates more crashes, perhaps because the connection between motherboard and dongle isn't as good.

7. If there's a remaining weak point in the B2, it's the wifi.  Weak connections crash B2 regularly, whatever it's doing, even with the dongle plugged straight into the unit.  Like others, I've gone wired, and it works well now.

8. The CD name database could be better.  Apple finds a lot more albums than Brennan does.

Those last two points are my plea to Brennan.

[Daniel Taylor]

A few of comments:

3. That is by design.

4. Scan Disk is especially important, imperitive actually, when renaming or loading music via NAS.

5. The WiFi dongle with an antenna can be a good improvement, depending on the particular environment. If your WiFi signal with the short dongle is good, then the other one won't help much.  But in the case where the short one is marginal, then the other one could be the solution.

6. Again, this will be dependent on the particular case.  Others have reported success.

7. A weak WiFi signal is not the fault of the B2.  When the signal is lost, the choice for the B2 is to either let the connection stay dropped, or to try and reconnect.  When it constantly has to try and reconnect, performance suffers.  Some might say that it should let the signal stay dropped and just report the problem.

An observation of my own:

A. Don't ask the B2 to do more than one thing at a time.  It is not good at multi-tasking and bad things often can happen.

[Daniel Taylor]

Alastair replied to me privately that with WiFi dropouts, his B2 symptoms can be quite sever.  It occurs to me that such a reaction on the part of the B2 could be because it's trying to do more than one thing at a time. I've seen very bad things happen under such circumstances. 

[Fred Waltman]

As for #3 it took my quite a while to figure that out. I would stop playback but left the web UI open in a browser tab (mainly so I could what was playing as I mostly use "mega playlists" playing at random (my own private radio station :)  ) I usually have at least 5-6 tabs open at one time. I couldn't figure out why my WAVs weren't compressing. I was having to do  do the manual "Compress Now" which didn't seem right.

Then one night my browser wanted to close to do an update and I didn't bother re-opening the B2 WebUI because I was calling it a night. Lo and behold, the next morning my WAVs were FLACs!

[Rik]

It sounds as if you were playing music on the B2 as you said you wanted to see ‘what was playing’.It won’t compress unless it’s idle.

[PMB]

Hi Alastair,

Thank you for the constructive comments.

1. We are learning that SD Cards do wear out - they have a limited number of write cycles and some models are better than others. Martin has reduced the writes to the SD Card to a minimum now to try to extend the life of the card.

3. If the web Ui is open the B2 thinks it is being used so won't go into Standby.

4. I power my B2 on and off each time I use it (usually daily as part of my support role) and believe the regular rebooting keeps it healthy (my theory only).

I did think that the B2 does a Scan Disk as part of the power on bootup sequence but I'm 100% on this.

5, 6, 7. The B2 definitely likes a decent WiFi signal - collective thinking on this suggests -50dBm (-40dBm being a stronger signal and -60dBm a weaker one) is a good target. However WiFi signal quality is also a factor and can be affected by electrical equipment (microwaves are good example).

We cannot control individual environments and set up so make suggestions to improve the signal level. Many have found fitting the dongle onto a 1m USB extension cable does help and does the RT5370 dongle with built in antenna.

A wired, Ethernet, connection is the best solution but not always practical.

8. Martin says he is now combining the CDDBs from MusicBrainz and freedb (the original CDDB we used) and updating 'mydb', so try downloading that to see if it makes any difference - Maintenance menu >> Get mydb.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Fred Waltman]

Well, no -- the browser tab had the Web UI open but the B2 wasn't playing anything and hadn't for hours. It makes sense that even when nothing is playing that the javascript in the browser is making queries back to the B2 to see what's up, so the B2 is never really inactive, but that wasn't obvious to me: Nothing is playing, why isn't it compressing? Maybe a note in the Web UI page would help reduce future confusion ("Web UI being open will prevent B2 from going into standby and compressing tracks." or some such)

Newbie Fred

[Daniel Taylor]

I just went searching for this on the Brennan website, and it is NOT well documented.  In fact, on the Basics page, it says the following:

"Compression
"When you rip a CD the B2 copies the CD in the original WAV format. This is then compressed to either FLAC or MP3 when the B2 sitting idle (not playing music)."

No wonder there is confusion.  At the very least, the documentation should be updated to correct that errant statement about compressing when "not playing music."

[PMB]

Hi Daniel,

Will do!

Paul

Brennan Support.