Mosaic crashing after seconds with AssetUPnP-Server

[hifi-bamberg (Christian Mueller)]

Hi there,
we are running AssetUPnP at our shop as sever - so does one of our new Bartók owners. When using this server, after some klicks the Mosaic-app crashes. If you manage to play a track, you won’t be able to play another one as the app already crashed. The problem does not appear we you take our Twonky-server (running on a Melco).
With the old app, Asset does work.

This can be confirmed with the Network-bridge as well as with our Bartók. Both are running the latest software available today. Our AssetUPnP-server (R6.2) is runnig on a linux-machine - the system of our customer is on his Synology NAS. The problem occurs on iPad Air / iPad 2018 with iOS 12.3.1, latest version of the app.

Thank you very much for your help. If necessary I can provide further information about the setup or a screen video.

Yours,
Christian

[Andrew (Andrew Papanikolas)]

Hi Christian,

Per the release notes our only supported UPnP server with Mosaic 1.0.x is MinimServer and this is the server software that we use as an internal engineering reference. It’s free and available for MacOS, Windows, Linux, most popular NAS platforms, and Melco.

There are many UPnP server software packages out there and they all interpret the UPnP “standard” differently. It would be impossible for us to support various quirks of all of these options so we elected to focus on the one option that is the most stable and follows the UPnP standards the closest.

We’ve had good luck with almost every other server with the exception of Asset. It has some odd behaviors which cause some issues in certain setups.

There’s more information in the FAQ (which is also part of the distributor documentation that we sent out at release time):

[Mosaic FAQ] What UPnP server should I use for my music library?

Mosaic was developed using MinimServer as our engineering reference and this is the server that we will continue to use for ongoing development work. Due to different software vendors having different interpretations of the UPnP standard we have found that all servers behave slightly differently under real-world conditions. As such we have determined that for the best user experience we must focus on one platform with full support from dCS rather than attempt to make Mosaic 100% compatible with…

[Mosaic FAQ] Why is MinimServer the only UPnP server software that is fully supported by dCS?

In our years of testing with different UPnP server software dCS has found that very few available offerings behave in a consistent and predictable manner. In order to provide the best possible user experience Mosaic was engineered with MinimServer in mind as it has proven to be one of the most stable, predictable and feature-rich servers available. We are confident that Mosaic will function correctly with MinimServer but cannot say the same about other available UPnP servers.

[Mosaic FAQ] What does it mean that MinimServer is the only UPnP server that dCS fully supports?

This simply means that customers using Mosaic with MinimServer will receive comprehensive support from dCS to include assistance with configuration as well as troubleshooting a customer’s Mosaic and MinimServer setup. Should a bug in either platform be found dCS will work with the customer, his/her dealer, and the MinimServer developer to ensure that the issue is corrected as quickly as possible. Furthermore we will continue to develop Mosaic using MinimServer as our engineering reference and a…

[hifi-bamberg (Christian Mueller)]

Thank you very much for the Information. I always thought that UPnP is a common standard.
Then we should examine, why Mosaic crashes when using Minim. Mosaic is working more stable with Minim but I manage to crash it within 5 minutes

[Andrew (Andrew Papanikolas)]

@hifi-bamberg

I always thought that UPnP is a common standard.

It is, but it’s very loosely defined which has led to every UPnP server author interpreting it slightly differently.

@hifi-bamberg

Then we should examine, why Mosaic crashes when using Minim.

Do you have a specific set of browsing operations that always cause a crash? In other words, it always crashes when browsing to a certain combination of genre, artist, album, etc.

Is there a common element in the crash scenarios? This could be a particular library item (artist / album / track / etc that’s always present) or the number of items returned in the container listing or a particular browsing feature that’s used (>>tag view, [folder view], >>complete album, etc), or a particular operation (initiating playback, browsing a long list, searching), etc.