Audirvana Studio

Software
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Audirvana’s new product “Audirvana Studio” is now available.

This is a new, subscription-based, audio player with support for playlists that span both local and streaming sources (Qobuz, Tidal, HRA). It supports the same features as the prior Audirvana 3.5, and adds significant new functionality and an all-new UX.

Currently available as a free 30-day trial, with the ability to actually subscribe coming in the next few days.

Existing Audirvana 3.5 subscribers can get a discount on the subscription. And both products can co-exist.

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I signed up for the free trial as soon as it went live. Creating an account and getting the email-link for download was quick and smooth.

As an existing Audirvana 3.5 user, Studio migrated my settings as part of the install and then immediately started syncing my music library to its new database.

My Qobuz settings came across automatically. For TIDAL I had to re-login via Audirvana for it to show up.

I’ve been playing with the macOS version of it for a bit over an hour so far …

Other than a re-arranged and re-designed UX, which is quite nice overall (fonts could do with being larger, or better yet user-selectable). Despite the comments that it is a ground-up new product, it feels a lot like Audirvana 3.5 in use.

Some things are missing … or I can’t find them, such as being able to see the native path for a local file that is playing (that’s going to be a pain in the arse).

The “Audio Output Settings” menu in the menu bar doesn’t do anything. You can get to those settings via “Preferences” and then the “Output Device” box, and the other settings that’ll show up on that page.

Some settings there are problematic. If you use Audio Units, it doesn’t save the changes to what’s selected. It does save the “Enabled/Disabled” flag. But if I change the first Audio Unit, and leave the screen (there’s no “Save” button I can find, and other options are sticky without one), it retains the previous setting.

It has yet to finish “Synchronizing” my local library, which is admittedly huge, but even though Audirvana was quite slow at this, it wasn’t THIS slow. The status bar showing progress is all over the place. So far it appears to be progressing alphabetically by artist, but I can’t play anything local past “D” yet, and it’s been at it for well over an hour. It now says it is “Analyzing Audio Files” … and the progress bar hasn’t moved in 20 minutes.

I am not convinced it is going to actually finish at all at this rate.

Trying the files it has indexed so far, and comparing the output to Audirvana 3.5, the bit-stream is identical. Which is amusing given all the claims of “massively improved sound”.

My next test, once/if it finishes indexing before I lose all interest, is to see whether it’ll run with no internet connection. With Roon you can do that no problem; you just need to be connected once every 30 days for the metadata sync. Since I only use Audirvana 3.5 on the go, from my laptop, and occasionally for plug-in use, if it won’t work fully disconnected (for at least the same 30 day periods as Roon), I have no use for it.

Quite a few issues that existed in Audirvana 3.5 are still present. Along with a bunch of new ones, most of which seem to be UX related so far. We’ll see how that goes when/if it finished syncing my library.

I’m a bit underwhelmed at this point.

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So I take it that means it’s as slow as 3.5 when scrolling and what not?

Do you see any option to import iTunes/Music playlists like in Roon?

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I would say scrolling is the same speed as in 3.5.

There’s an “Import Playlist” option, but I don’t have any to import (they’re all in Roon), so I don’t know what options it offers there.

I will say that its library/database management is, so far, just as weird as 3.5. Removing the music folder and re-synching leaves all the albums still visible. Rebuilding the database appears to do nothing there, either. There should be NO albums visible after that, but they are.

I’ll let it finish (if it does) this “Analyzing Audio files” thing it’s doing (glacial, whatever it is), and then try the re-build again. Failing that, I’ll blow the database away the hard way and start over.

But overall, so far, I think every bug I ran into in 3.5 has been faithfully re-created here. Which further makes me skeptical about it being a ground-up new product.

This includes things like it randomly splitting albums into two (or more) entries, with apparently random assignment of tracks between them, and with no apparent way to put them back together. I assume there’s a discrepancy in the metadata for those albums, and it’s using that to split them, but I can’t see what it is in ANY field. And the improved meta-data editor I either can’t find, or it’s more limited than the old one.

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I wound up having to delete the entire database (manually) to fix the local files issue.

After doing that, and restarting Audirvana Studio, it pops up a prompt saying it needs to “Migrate from version 3”. I selected “Cancel” on that, and it created a new, fresh, empty database.

Adding the appropriate music folder to that, and letting it sync, appears to have fixed the issue where files show up but won’t play.

Syncing/indexing is still impressively slow. I don’t remember 3.5 being this slow. It is possible this new “Analyzing audio files” step is slowing everything down.

At this point, even though it’s just the first few hours, this all feels too familiar with the experience I had with 3.5 … and if that persists … I feel another Roon license coming on

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I remember the second to last update on 3.5 to be very fast. I synced it with iTunes and it would be done within 2 minutes every time I added new music.

With the latest update, however, it became unreasonably slow whether I added 1 new song or 10 new albums…

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Thanks for taking the time to write this up. As someone who recently paid for Audirvana 3.5, I’m not in a hurry to pay for something new.

As long as they support the iPhone remote app, I’ll probably just stick to 3.5.

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Any opinion with respect to sound quality performance? I think I’ll try it next week, or maybe the next, once they get the startup kinks worked out.

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Doesn’t sound any different to me, nor does packet capture or measurement show any differences vs. 3.5 (or any other player properly operating with proper bit-perfect output for that matter).

Which doesn’t mean there can’t be differences in other setups, but there’s no audible difference vs. 3.5 across any of my rigs. I’m not using upsampling (outside what the Blu-Mk2 does in my headphone chain), or any other processing.

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Thanks. Appreciate the feedback and earlier comments.

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Still “analyzing audio files” … whatever that’s about …

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Apparently, during beta, one user had it take two days to complete the “Analyzing audio files” step … on a 40,000 track library.

My local library is more than 25x that size.

I suspect it’ll still be processing when the trial period ends …

Can’t imagine WTF it is doing that takes THAT long.

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Playing with DLNA/UPnP streaming …

No issues sending to my Linn Klimax DSM/2. Periodic dropouts sending to the Phantom II, starting with the first track I played.

Neither renderer has any issues via Roon, nor via my other, various, DLNA/UPnP/OpenHome control points and servers (Kazoo, Asset, etc.). I ran the Phantom’s all day yesterday via DLNA and no drop-outs.

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Trying Studio to see if UPnP problems are fixed (on 3.5 UPnP is borked on Big Sur 11.3). Nope. Still can’t stream to my Pi2AES. And Qobuz playlists are MIA. Audirvana not winning…

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I actually sprung for Roon on a lifetime sub this weekend. I trialed it a few months ago, but with all this Audirvana BS and the thought they could dump the lifetime subscription made me roll the dice and invest.

The Roon UI is much nicer and I do like the system. The Audirvana Studio reviews have not been great.

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A warning for everybody moving from iTunes to Audirvana: it will mess up your 1…5 star ratings. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

During the initial sync with my iTunes library Audirvana changed all the album ratings to an average of the ratings for the individual tracks within an album. That completely messed up my playlists.

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Did Audirvana change the album ratings on iTunes?

Just as an FYI, iTunes itself has a bug where it will randomly create album ratings, which overrides my track ratings and screws up my smart playlists. Luckily the track ratings themselves are not altered, so to fix this, I have to search for “not null” album ratings and delete them, so that the (not so) smart playlists can see my track ratings again. I’ve noticed it does this to tracks I’ve played recently, so I periodically sort iTunes by “last played” to find any new incursions. The bug has been there for years, and Apple has never bothered to fix it.

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OK, I cannot say for sure that it was Audirvana - but it happened during the initial sync with iTunes, and it stopped as soon as I killed the Audirvana process.

I am aware of this bug and follow the same procedure you described once in a while (especially when “unwanted” tracks show up in a play list). But today it messed with a lot of albums, not only recently played tracks.

Anyway, I stopped that Audirvana experiment.

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I am thankful to read of your experience. I recently upgraded to an M1 Mac Mini and I’m having lots of frustration getting her up and running. I have been able to play Qobuz to my Pi2AES mconnect on my iPhone.

I’ve also had spotty success with Audirvana 3.5 on my 2009 IMac to my Pi2AES. I haven’t received a download e-mail for Audirvana Studio yet, but I will post here. Here’s to hoping Audirvana patches Studio quickly. So far I’ve been unimpressed by their roll out. For example, I wasn’t even able to download 3.5 to install on my new system all weekend.

And while we’re carrying on about M1 Macs, the AU plugins I used to use from Waves don’t work. It’s been a royal pain in the butt so far.

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After some more experimentation …

Offline Usage Works:

If no network connection is available, it just prompts you with what will not function, and lets you know that you need to restart the application if you want the network-supported features once you have a connection again.

Analyzing Audio Files:

According to the author, this is computing the acoustic ID for each file so that Studio can lookup metadata via MusicBrainz.

This was still running after leaving it over night, with a fair amount of RAM and CPU being chewed up by it. The progress bar looked like it should have finished, but it was still grinding away.

Restarting the application seems to have restarted the process, though its impossible to tell if it is re-analyzing everything, or if the UX is just borked and its picking up from where it left off. If it’s the latter, I estimate it will take between, oh, 2 and 3 million years to complete.

Syncing Music:

This took forever the first time.

I figured future scans would just look for deltas, so I enabled the “Rescan network folders at each start” option, but given how long that took I am not so sure it isn’t just doing it all over.

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