JPlay App

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share an update on the Qobuz playback issues that many of you have been experiencing over the past two weeks or so. To be clear upfront: this is a Qobuz-side issue, not a JPLAY bug. I've been receiving a lot of support requests about tracks that won't play, playback stopping mid-album, "error sending action to renderer" messages, and similar symptoms — and they all trace back to the same root cause.

Qobuz has officially confirmed the incident to their partners. Here's what they shared initially:

"We have identified a technical issue affecting the availability of certain audio files on our API. The problem specifically concerns files larger than 50MB. It results in a size mismatch error between the requested and received data, linked to a partial object caching issue. Our technical team is currently investigating to identify the root cause and the scope of impacted files."

And an update from yesterday:

"We have identified the source of the playback errors: it is a caching anomaly with our CDN provider. In practice, some distribution servers are hosting a corrupted or incomplete file. Since each audio quality corresponds to a separate recording, switching quality often allows you to fall back on a healthy file and work around the issue. Our teams are currently listing the affected tracks and carrying out a gradual cache purge. The situation should be resolved very shortly."

A few practical takeaways:

- The issue mainly affects files larger than 50MB, which is why hi-res tracks (24/96 and above) are hit the hardest while CD-quality content is mostly unaffected.

- As a workaround, switching the streaming quality from 24/192 to 24/96 or even 16/44 (CD) can often help — each quality level is a separate file on Qobuz's CDN, so a different quality may give you a healthy copy.

- Qobuz is performing a gradual cache purge, so affected tracks should start working again progressively over the coming days. (fingers crossed)

- There's nothing we can fix on the JPLAY side — this needs to be resolved by Qobuz at the CDN level.

Thanks everyone for your patience. I'll post another update once Qobuz confirms everything is back to normal.

Marcin

@marcin_gps thanks for posting this! Sheds more light on what’s happening.
 

I’m very impressed by non existence of health checks and internal controls within the Qobuz ecosystem. This is a true amateur hour on their end. When you’re unable to identify an issue the second it occurs and it takes you weeks to acknowledge it after tons of customers have complained. Looks like they decided to provide the explanation after they figured out how to fix it. 

@paullb I have been using jplay for the last month. It sounds better than roon, to me, and has very similar interface that is intuitive and works. 
I stopped streaming from Qobuz and use Tidal only. 

I have a Weiss DAC that supports JPlay and briefly looked into a trial of it. The problem for me with JPlay is I have to use my iPhone as a controller. No thanks. I hate using the iPhone as a a remote or controller for anything.

I didn't even bother trying it out. I use Roon running on a an Intel NUC for the server and use my MacBook Air (and very occasionally iPad Pro 12.9) as a Roon controller.

@dwette 

Why would you "have to" use your iPhone to control JPlay?  I've been using it for three years exclusively with iPads of various generations.