DDAR - First impressions

[Ian Oliver <ioliver.lists@xxxxxxx>]

1)
It's big!  I really wasn't expecting something this big, and inside the
box is mostly fresh air.  And the display is tiny.

2)
It's slow!  Getting lists of artists or albums takes about 10 seconds
and getting a list of tracks about 40 seconds. This is with about 4.5k
tracks and about 300 albums.  Fortunately the playlists view (by far
the most useful) seems much faster.

3)
The UI is a bit buggy. After a reboot and a view of the playlists it
keeps selecting one of the playlists while I'm scrolling through the
list.  After doing this a couple of times and getting sworn at it seems
to pack it in.

4)
Rebuilding the database of music takes about eight minutes and the DDAR
seems to get confused if it isn't rebooted after this is done. Note
though that my PC is only a K6-200, which is right at the minimum
system requirement. BTW has anyone tried ID3V2 tags? Are they faster?

5)
Music can skip at the start if the PC is busy, but again this could be
my slow PC.

6)
Random only seems to shuffle the playlist as you load it - I was hoping
to be able to leave playlists running on repeat-all and random to get a
continuously random set of tracks.

7)
It's utterly wonderful! It really does prove the concept of distributed
music even though it currently implements that concept in a rather
crude way.

Today some hold start getting drilled in the kitchen to put the DDAR on
a shelf rather than it just chucking around on the surface. Sadly it's
much too big for the gap we had in mind so I get to do lots of extra
wiring. Oh well!

Ian Oliver
Sunny Leeds, UK
Using Java on Tini for control via Dallas 1-wire