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A Tale for Your Bemusement

This is a tale for your bemusement; no other point to it, really. I’m posting because no one I know would have the kind of emphatic understanding that some of you may have.

For 13 years or so, I’ve owned and enjoyed a Sony HAP S-1 music server, the little sibling to Sony’s more featured HAPZ-1ES. The machine analyzes the files for each disk transferred to it and puts them into general categories, e.g., Genre, Artist, Album. It also has a feature called “SenseMe Channels.” Each file (or track) is analyzed and put into one of fourteen “channels” (playlists) which broadly correspond to the emotional content of the track, e.g., Morning, Evening, Midnight, Energetic, Mellow, etc. Although I usually selected Albums for my listening, I enjoyed using the SenseMe feature; I liked the unexpected juxtapositions encountered on the playlists, and I liked listening to tracks that I might not have listened to in a while.

A couple of years ago, the HAP S1 misfunctioned after a power outage. When I tried to play an album, only the first track would play. Finding no answer in Sony’s online support, I contacted ES support by phone. The service rep said the only thing I could do was a factory reboot, which meant erasing all 14,000 tracks of music from the internal hard drive. I did that and then reloaded the tracks. The machine’s Album selection feature worked again, but it wouldn’t analyze the 14,000 tracks for the SenseMe feature. I contacted Sony ES support again and was told that they didn’t have an answer and wouldn’t find one because the machine and its software aren’t supported any longer. Since then, every time I see an announcement for a new music server, I look to see whether any has a “SenseMe” feature. So far, none of them has.

About ten days ago, I saw that the machine was analyzing the tracks for SenseMe purposes. I can’t tie that to any particular event. We had bad weather here in Portland in January that resulted in a prolonged power outage at our home,, but that preceded the SenseMe revival by six or seven weeks.

In its support literature, Sony advises that the analysis for each track can take 5 minutes or more. So far, the machine has slowly but surely churned its way through analyzing about 2500 of the 14,000 tracks, so it’s going to be a while yet.

Thanks for reading.

Jim

 

jimcrane
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anotherbob
331 posts
 

Great story!

bondmanp
1,789 posts
 

FWIW, there have been many times that software updates to a few of my audio components have seemed to cause problems.  The natural thing to do is reboot.  What's funny is that very often, 2 or 3 reboots are necessary before the problems correct themselves.  Ghost in the machine?

jimcrane OP
160 posts
 

Thanks to all for reading and taking the time to comment.

@carlsbad2, over the time I’ve had the HAP S1 there’ve been two firmware updates, the last one of which was some time ago, at least 5-6 years ago or more.. Until I learned that Sony had stopped support, I hoped that a firmware update would add to the machine’s streaming capability, which now and forever is only Spotify and TuneIn.

@Jond, I need to correct something. The machine doesn’t sort uploaded disks into Genre (“Genre” is a way to select music to play, along with Artist, Album, etc.). In fact, when I ripped the disks using dbpoweramp, I assigned the Genre. Unfortunately, I was often inconsistent, which has diminished the utility of “Genre” has a classification. So I am often amused by my long-ago decisions about that.

@bondmanp, your comment about a ghost in the machine reminded me of tube televisions. When they malfunctioned, sometimes a shaking or a slap to one side would make them work again. I’ve unseriously considered doing that to the Sony when it’s not worked, but I’ll remember your suggestion about multiple rebooting.

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panzrwagn
443 posts
 

Slapping a tube TV might have helped reset a loose tube, but otherwise isn't a very good idea give the fragility of tube filaments.

The modern equivalent of multiple reboots is often required before any upgraded software has reloaded, and in correct order, e.g. a before b, but upgraded c requires d before e functions correctly, and all need to be loaded and communicating before f works at all. 

kacomess
199 posts
 

I unplugged all my equipment from the walls when the bad weather hit this winter in Portland. PGE has a real penchant though for power surges and outages ("maintenance") so I invested in a high-quality surge protector a long time ago and I'm glad i did.

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