BLUESOUND VAULT 2 PLAY QUEUE WOES REGARDING RANDOMISED LIBRARY SONG PLAYBACK
Answered
Firstly, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
(I believe that the issue below might have been mentioned in passing in another thread but I can't find it, so here are chapter and verse.)
NB This happens in both iPadOS and Windows 10.
The player is on 4.8.7.
Until recently, my Vault 2 offered me the useful facility of being able to play all of the songs in the Library in one long randomised play queue.
Firstly, Autofill had to be on and the play queue empty. After this, I would display the front page of the library and tap on Songs. This resulted in all of the songs in the library being listed in alphabetical order, from # to Z.
Then, I would tap on the first song on the list ("#1 Dee Jay" by Goody Goody in my case), the song would start playing, and it would show at the top of the play queue, with the remaining 39,000+ tracks listed below in alphabetical order (as a result of autofill).
The icing on the cake was that if I then tapped on the "random play" button, the play queue would be randomised, with all 39,000+ tracks listed randomly. This done, I could pick interesting tracks from the list to play, or just let tracks play in their randomised order from whichever track I tapped on the list to select as the starting point for playback.
A really cool feature.
Now, however, tapping on Songs leads to a list of a few tens of songs being displayed ,and with that list then being very slowly and jerkily populated thereafter as one attempts to scroll down the list.
Tapping on the first song ("#1 Dee Jay") still leads to that song being played and also being displayed at the top of the play queue, with subsequent tracks being displayed in alphabetical order as before. However, that Play Queue list ends after 99 tracks, with a track called "24 Carat Black". That leaves most of the remaining 39,000 tracks unlisted and therefore unplayable, and renders the whole random play features virtually useless to me.
Is this change by design, e.g. the consequence of accessing the music files in the library in a different way, perhaps in much smaller data blocks, or is it the result of a counter variable deliberately or inadvertently being limited to two significant figures, or is it......?
Whatever it is, it has become a serious usability deficiency for me.
Please can you explain what it is that I'm seeing, and please can the old functionality be restored?
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Official comment
Hi Ian,
I have forwarded your feedback to quality assurance for further evaluation. -
+1
I just tested this and indeed, the list stops after a few 10's of tracks. Yet, in folder view if you make a large folder containing several 100's of tracks the playlist fills as before. Bizarre.
Must have happened with the latest "update". It seems we loose some functionality after each update or is it a downgrade? At least Bluesound should let us know beforehand if they scrap some function. (see also comments on backup of playlists)
Upgrading is rapidly becoming problematic since the 4.0. I think the firmware became so complex they had to delete some parts of it to keep the rest working, somewhat.
To temporarily solve the issue a .m3u playlist could be made.
Sorry if this sounds bitter but I recall the early days of the controller when things were simple and just worked as expected.
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This sounds to me as though more regression testing might have been needed, but that's just speculation.
(Put simply, regression testing involves re-testing existing functionality to make sure that a new software change hasn't accidentally broken any of it. And this is no mean task.)
My take, based in part upon what we've been told by Tony is ......
The world inhabited by Bluesound players in 2024 is far more complex than when their first player appeared in 2013, and I fully understand the need for the complete redesign of BluOS and the controller apps that started with V4.
In short, my take is that the old architecture was too complex and possibly too full of over-elaborate long procedures and conditional statements, some living within BluOS on the player, and others living in three different guises within the three controller apps (iPadOS, Windows and Android) to allow one to keep track of exactly when any statement is actually being executed during usage and also whether the observed behaviour is player behaviour or controller behaviour, or a bit of both.
This meant that the old architecture was too internally complex and messy to support any further software development.
Therefore, a new architecture was required, and V4 was in reality, therefore, V1 of an entirely new set of software that just happened (!!!) to look a lot like V3.
If I understand things, what has replaced the old architecture is, in part, the 21st century version of something that back in the 90s might have been referred to as Reduced Instruction Set Computing, i.e. better-written, more rationalized, and shorter more general-purpose procedures that, when used in combination with well-designed parameters, can be executed under multiple different circumstances and can, therefore, support far more functionality.
Additionally, my understanding is that most of the functionality is now based around each controller app saying to the player, "Please prepare and send me this list. Please play this track. Please pause this track. Please shuffle the playlist and send me the results of that shuffle so that I can display the new list. Please keep me updated with any changes initiated from other controllers." etc.
Back before V4, it was probably, "Please do this to get things started, and I'll finish it off in my own special way.", which is harder to manage, to keep track of, and to maintain.
The miracle is that Bluesound were actually able to recreate nearly all of our old familiar functionality using this entirely new tool set inasmuch as I believe that this is what they achieved.
My belief is also that they went with V4.0 when it wasn't quite ready, i.e. not all of the rewritten functionality was quite ready, and more regression testing was needed to shake the remaining issues out. Consequently, we all moaned about it.
Additionally, although the redesigned software might be easier to maintain and update, regression testing has become a bigger challenge because: -
(1) The consequent ease of development means that there is now even more functionality with increased variety and complexity to regression test
(2) Each of the new, more generic procedures is more widely used, meaning, in turn, that each software change potentially affects far more functionality than before.
(3) Therefore, there is potentially far more regression testing now required whenever preparing one or more software changes for release.
In short, therefore, although software design and development might have become easier with V4, leading to the development of the new and more complex functionality demanded in 2024, regression testing has consequently become far more challenging, which might be why we keep finding little things that have stopped working properly.
(This also, perhaps, speaks to a need for a bit more analysis during solution design, to head off issues before they arise, and to therefore reduce the delays that can arise when an issue is found during regression testing, i.e. at the second most disruptive stage of delivery.)
Just my take, however, and easy for me to say.
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Today, I replaced Windows Controller 4.4.1 with 3.20.2 and tested again.
I observed the same behaviour, which suggests that it originates from within the player and not from within the controller.
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