For Christmas....the dCS present!

Unfortunately the iOS app has gotten “stuck” in Apple’s system and we’re working with Apple to get this resolved.

Android was available in a manner of minutes from the release time.

Very sorry for the inconvenience.

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I see it now and am in the processing of updating.

Have just updated and having a look around. Initial thoughts are it’s great to have the playlists from the legacy app ported across - so easy to discard old ones. Never knew how to do that, indeed if it was possible.

Delighted to see a scroll bar but very disappointed that there is still no alphabetical scroll for album and album artist.

A very worthwhile upgrade so sincere thanks to all involved.

Available in France. Let’s move

Just updated the iOS app in The Netherlands :+1:t2:

There are two ways to implement this and neither is trivial.

The first would be an indicator that would pop-up during scrolling to show the position of the alphabet that you are in. This is easy enough to do, but it assumes that the list is always sorted alphabetically. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and there’s no way of knowing how the entire list is sorted just by calling it up. All that we see are the names of each list entry.

An example of a place where this might break is the so-called “smart sorting” that some UPnP servers perform (e.g. displaying “The Beatles” in “B” as opposed to “T”). Another would be a composer list that is displayed in “Firstname Lastname” format but actually sorted “Lastname, Firstname”

The second option is to show an A-Z index of the list where tapping on a letter would jump you to that position in the alphabet. Implementing this on our side is incredibly cumbersome as it would require reading in the contents of the entire list and then processing that. It’s not a big deal when there are hundreds or even a couple of thousand entries, but what do we do with the cases where the user has tens of thousands of albums? Reading in that list, sorting, and binning it would be extremely expensive in terms of resources and we don’t have a lot of resource to begin with.

We’re working on a solution here as the A-Z index is where we want to be. We won’t release anything until we have something that will work regardless of the number of items in the list. I can’t provide a timeline, but it’s a problem that we are working on solving.

Thanks for that explanation @Andrew Look forward to see how this develops.

Does it seem to me that the sound has changed also with Mosaic changes?

What changes does Network board update include?

It hasn’t.

All changes are in the release notes

With Mosaic 1.1.0 now out does this leave two still to go from @Andrew ‘s original post?

With 1.1.0 we have two down (1.0.2 and 1.1.0). The third release has been pushed out a bit and may end up coming in stages.

Intriguing!

Waiting for the two after dinner SW aperitifs =)

How does the forecast look, is it 100% focus on just the app functionality, or do you got any more FW fine tuning in your sleeves SQ wise on your products in the horizon? Probably the most of the dCS owners laying most wight in is the SQ , then the aesthetics and on the same place comes the usability.
Wating on a slight performance upgrade for the NWB would be great, and it would also be fun if you could give the older products in the line-up a small FW enhancement or a new filter, and not only focus on the new customers & products.

Apologies for the dual post but I’m never sure which is the appropriate thread to solicit a response:

"Very pleased to see a scrolling facility has been implemented in Mosaic 1.1.0. While this is a good step forward beyond using the alphabetised headings with MinimServer that I used previously, I have found that when scrolling through long lists (e.g. 3500 works/albums in a genre) I get a blank screen for 1 or 2 seconds before the listing reappears. Comparing this behaviour to that of the BubbleUPnP control app which I used for several years before buying the dCS Network Bridge, scrolling through the same list is completely smooth with no blank-screen interruptions.

Is it possible to make the scrolling smooth for long lists in the next Mosaic release? Is it a question of buffer size for storing the list? If so perhaps this could be increased or be adjustable by the user?"

From my point of view, the best would be that dCS ensures full uPNP compatibility with specific largely used applications like BubbleUpnp (or even OpenHome) and focus their application on configuration and smooth upgrades.
For years we had to cope with either the lack of applications in Android world or their poor quality on iOS. So eventually I found alternatives that had to deal with compatibility issues with dCS products (i.e. feature works with other but not with dCS streaming appliances - like gapeless, volume control, large image etc.). I appreciate the sheer efforts in order to improve the situation but dCS is not a software company. It cannot compete with such so I would rather they concentrate on their specific strengths.
Obviously that does not mean to enchain people to solution like Roon which requires a paid subscription and brings another set of proprietary protocols …

I must say I totally disagree with that point of view. Mosaic is improving every release and is already pleasant to use. There is room for improvement but it seems dCS has excellent programmer(s), the software is stable and has few bugs…I do hope they go on with their software roadmap.

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What I see is that Mosaic is not only a software which act as a remote but a backbone of the software roadmap including setup, parameters and for sure UPnP.
I’m not any more an UPnP user if if sometime i come back to it. I’m not part of these persons who are complaining about the fact that Roon does not propose directory browsing. My library is perfectly tagged and organized and I even use Roon. When I use UPnP I never use the directory browsing but browsing by artists, albums and, according to me, what is missing is a « recent added » browsing like what the lumin/esoteric app is providing. Anyway i do not see so much differences in terms of functionalities between mosaic and what the other well known on the market already provide since years. So in a nutshell, as mosaic is a backbone of the software journey I will still use it and look for next evolution on the UPnP side.

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I did not mean that it should not exist. For setup, configuration checks and updates I do think it makes sense. For the rest, it is just really basic. When you compare it with something like Lumin it is far from the mark.
The question is how much are they ready to work in that direction? As an old customer I experienced all the predecessors of Mosaic and they always stayed pretty crude from that point of view. Let’s hope this time it will be different…

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The only aspect that I’m most concerned about is Sound Quality, and on that front, dCS having full control over Mosaic gives them the ability to focus on delivering exactly that, the best sound quality experience (with good enough usability).

In fact, to me, Mosaic sounds distinctly better than Roon when playing back the exact same tracks from the same source - HDD or Qubuz or Tidal etc - for whatever reason (maybe Roon/RAAT does something funky). I’m really not interested in Lumin App type of bells & whistles.

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How dCS could deliver a solution does not sounds perfect in terms of quality ? I remember that they stopped thinking delivering sound over the Network Bridge USB for this reason so how they could support Roon if it sounds at least not equal to UPnP ? What is the problem with Roon from your view ?