Getting Jriver to my living room receiver help needed

musicmahn

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Hi All -
I'm just the millionth old person to come here and ask for help getting music from a hard drive to the old receiver. I apologize and thank you in advance :)
I've been on a long quest to achieve the ideal digital setup (being forced to leave my precious CDs behind) and have struggled throughout. I thought things were finally ok until my setup decided to just stop working and exhibiting new faulty behaviour.

Here is a true history of where I am at and my limited level of understanding!

Long story short -
I would really like to use Jriver to stream the FLACs I have on my NAS. I would like to control it from my windows tablet and play to the old receiver in the living room. I currently have a network share and use DLNA to stream to my Chromecast audio (optical out to the receiver). I use BubbleUPnP because chromecast does not support DLNA on it's own. Everything was working fine until it simply stopped working. Perhaps there was a power outage and I didn't try using it again until that point? I don't know for sure.

So, a suggestion for a fix would be awesome. As mentioned there is a bit deeper history to my current setup in that link above.
Alternatively I'm surely open to a new device that could allow me to retain the bolded desires above. Is there something to replace the Chromecast with that would make my life easier? What I currently have going is simply not reliable and at the moment nearly unplayable. It's either a poor setup choice or I am doing something wrong with settings and firewall/virus/ports etc.


Thanks again for reading this it hurts my heart going through it!
 
Rebooting your network router is the simplest thing you can try.

Next go into BubbleUPnP interface, look at media renderers, highlight the chromecast (if detected) and select create DLNA renderer. BubbleUPnP may have lost its connection.

Alternatively you can buy DLNA music players on amazon etc that would remove the need for BubbleUPnP or you can also make your own with a Raspberry Pi (can go into more details on that if you want).

Also is this an old or new Chromecast ? new chromecast have a video interface with remote and might be able to access AndroidTV app store in which case there is software that could remove the need for BubbleUPnP and just appear directly to Jriver.
 
Ugh you know, rebooting the router is one thing I did NOT try! What's weird at this stage is that I CAN get it to still play music - just very, very poorly. Hard for me to understand this as it would seem to be an all or nothing situation.

Anyway as soon as I get the opportunity I will get the reboot a try to tinker some more. If not then I'll be asking you good folks for the type of recommendation you have hinted at. The chromecast is the original chromecast audio - so there is no video component to it. Only cost me like $20 though so I'm more than fine spending some money for a more reliable replacement and setup.

Thanks for your reply!
 
Alternatively you can buy DLNA music players on amazon etc that would remove the need for BubbleUPnP or you can also make your own with a Raspberry Pi (can go into more details on that if you want).
So I suppose this is where I am at because rebooting the router did not change anything. Also weird here is that the Staff at Jriver tell me "when your song times out after 5 seconds it means a DLNA connection was not made". Yet usually when I wait 30 seconds and appears nothing is going to happen, the song magically starts playing. This brings me back to that all or nothing thought I would assume. Why is it only partially working?

Anyway more thoughts on a fix would be great but I'm surely ready to entertain the idea of replacing the Chromecast/BubbleUPnP setup with something that would be actually reliable. Please remember my bolded preferences above when making suggestion. Many tell me just use your phone to control and while I agree that might run well, it's simply not the interface I wish to use when listening to music at home. I purchased a large tablet solely for running Jriver and would really prefer to stick this route

Thanks for your help :)
 
So I suppose this is where I am at because rebooting the router did not change anything. Also weird here is that the Staff at Jriver tell me "when your song times out after 5 seconds it means a DLNA connection was not made". Yet usually when I wait 30 seconds and appears nothing is going to happen, the song magically starts playing. This brings me back to that all or nothing thought I would assume. Why is it only partially working?

Anyway more thoughts on a fix would be great but I'm surely ready to entertain the idea of replacing the Chromecast/BubbleUPnP setup with something that would be actually reliable. Please remember my bolded preferences above when making suggestion. Many tell me just use your phone to control and while I agree that might run well, it's simply not the interface I wish to use when listening to music at home. I purchased a large tablet solely for running Jriver and would really prefer to stick this route

Thanks for your help :)

Maybe the problem is with BubbleUPnP, if the PC side software generates log files you could try asking their tech support and send them the logs to see if they notice what's going wrong.

Another option is use this tool which will cast the windows system audio to a chromecast.

So in this case your using the jriver to play the music on the tablet and that software will redirect it to the chromecast.

Airparrot is a commercial option though its primarily for video, I think it can do music only too.

The downside of these approach's is that the audio might be converted, not entirely sure, you'd have to listen yourself and see if you can hear a difference.
 
Yes I wouldn't be looking to get a converted signal.

So like I had said I know you good folks out there are streaming music from your NAS just fine so I'm wondering what could replace my chromecast with to make my life better here. Eliminating a link in the chain (BubbleUPnP) would be just fine too.
 
What connections does your sound system have ?

And how much money do you want to spend ?

For example if you have only optical inputs on the sound system and don't want to spend a lot of money a Raspberry Pi kit plus HDMI audio extractor with optical/toslink could work.

So how this would work is
1) Connect the HDMI output of the RPi to one of the inputs on that switch and optical output to your sound system, video output of switch goes to TV.

2) Download librelec software and install it to microSD card (will need PC USB SD card reader) and boot it by inserting into RPi and powering it on, complete installation, connect to WiFi etc using a temporary USB keyboard (can be removed after).

3) Go into settings->services->UPnP and enable allow control of this system.

4) Fire up jriver and hopefully it should see Kodi media centre as a target device.

You could try installing Kodi on any other computer temporarily to test that UPnP works correctly with jriver.

There are commercial DLNA music players like this, but that model is analogue output only, no optical, there are more expensive models with optical.
 
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Or if I was going the raspberry pi route couldn't I skip the hdmi switch and instead use this?
sorry i'm not sure how to link
on amazon it's called "HiFiBerry Digi+ Standard"
The optical output isn't an absolute necessity, I just figured this would give me the best sound as it's what I've always used for CDs


Money isn't much of an issue if it helps me to achieve what I dream of above. The JRiver desktop (which is windows based) is simply the best interface and library mgmt to fit my needs. I just need that reliable setup that gets music to my speakers and as far as I can tell DLNA is the only option?
 
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Or if I was going the raspberry pi route couldn't I skip the hdmi switch and instead use this?
sorry i'm not sure how to link
on amazon it's called "HiFiBerry Digi+ Standard"
The optical output isn't an absolute necessity, I just figured this would give me the best sound as it's what I've always used for CDs


Money isn't much of an issue if it helps me to achieve what I dream of above. The JRiver desktop (which is windows based) is simply the best interface and library mgmt to fit my needs. I just need that reliable setup that gets music to my speakers and as far as I can tell DLNA is the only option?

If your sound system has HDMI then yeah just plug the RPi direct into it, the reason I linked to the extractor was because its a cheap and easy way to get the audio out over optical.

The optical adapter for the RPi requires the use of an OS that supports it, I dont know if libreelec does but the Hiberry site provides its own OS to turn it into a music streamer.

Another option is the OSMC Vero 4K which is basically an out of the box libreelec/RPi style box that has optical built in, it runs Kodi same as RPi.

Ultimately it depends on what JRiver supports casting music to, I'm not too familiar with it, if JRiver can cast music to other JRiver installs then a cheap PC stick running windows could also suffice.
 

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