Very happy with my Amp 2.1 hardware. It connects seamlessly, sounds as good as a small class D can be expected to, never hangs, skips or glitches. (With a 24v 5A power supply, it has tons of clean headroom to drive a pair of 50W 3-ways from an old Denon shelf system I had sitting around - no need for a subwoofer with these.)
BUT, the software is a PITA.
The ONLY music source we ever use is my PLEX DLNA server. (20,000 FLAC tracks from 1,600 CDs)
Using the phone app, to pick an album to play (yes, you can guess my age by the fact I prefer listening to entire albums) requires this process:
Tap browse
Tap “My music”
Tap “Home music share”
Tap “Plex media server…”
Tap “Music”
Tap “Jukebox”
Tap “All artists” or “By album” (or whatever)
Scroll for days, wait for list to reload a few times
Tap album name
Tap first song
OK, I am a tech guy and can do that pretty intuitively, but it’s still a pain. Teaching my wife to do it? Ain’t nobody got time for that. If we could bypass a bunch of those steps (say down to #7) it would be a huge help.
Things I’ve tried: The web interface won’t let me browse for songs. The “Presets” don’t seem to work at all - maybe they work with Spotify or the like, but that’s no help to me - maybe I am missing something. Favorites is way too limited to be of use - we don’t just listen to single songs. Playlists might help a little, but I would be looking at maybe 100 hours of setting up playlists just to get started. Ugh.
Oh, forgot to mention that 4Stream doesn’t work with PLEX Playlists or Collections. The playlists don’t even appear in the app. Collections show up, but are empty - it doesn’t matter if it is an album collection or a track collection, they are empty either way. This could be a PLEX bug, or a DLNA limitation, but whatever the cause, they don’t work in 4Stream.
I also find navigating “My Music” to have problems using 4Stream. I access my collection in Windows Media Player on a network PC. The Android version hangs, and both the iOS and Android do not show songs in Playlists in the order defined on the PC.
Seems to correct this is to ‘stream’ from my PC to the A30+. but then I have to go sit at the PC and not use the mobile device
@bert try some another linkplay based altrnatives, for example iEast, AudioCast, or Wiim… I have the same problem with “My Music”-folder in the new version of 4stream app.
I use Arylic mini board with either 4Stream or WIIM on Apple, and I also have a large collection of FLEC tracks on Windows PC. I use Window Media Player Network Sharing to access my music files, and here is the steps required:
Browse
My Music
Home Music Server
My Windows Library
Music
Folders
Music
From there, I just browse and select albums organized in tree structure. Not saving any steps comparing to a third party music file services, but having a solid grip on my albums or genres, etc.
