Vtuner down

There isn’t a Naim CEO. Naim is just a division of Focal/Naim, a French company owned by the Vervent Audio Group (which is a financial investment vehicle).

The CEO is Cedrick Boutonet. The Focal Naim Group Commercial Director is Arnaud Hendoux.

I’ve been using for years m3u files for radio stations with minimstreamer. The license only costs $14USD ($10GBP)per year. I drop the station artwork in the playlist folder same name as the radio station (.jpg) and the artwork appears in the app. Could never figure out how to get the artwork to show up using the asset app. A useful solution when problems with vtuner arise. I had JB Radio, RP, and all the Naim stations running during the vtuner outage.

In Asset I think you have to use the AssetUserUpstreamImages folder, but it’s not very user friendly.

I haven’t seen that option anywhere so I think you’re right.

Thank you Richard. I have located an email address but not sure if it is correct and sent a polite message for some senior level statement of intent on the matter.

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Thanks David.

The world has gone digital and so has the HiFi industry so the ability to supply and scale these services globally is essential. It has allowed me to join some dots as I have been having issues with iRadio streaming for months. Naim technical has been very helpful but it now appears a much broader issue that my naim equipment only…! Lesson learned is I should have tied in here a while ago to learn form the community of users.

If this is your most serious problem this year, you are a lucky person…….

I use a streamer for almost 5 years now, here in France it’s incredible stable and for free…….
In combination with a payed Qobuz subscription an my Melco I am a happy person.

Happy days!

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Vervent are funded by the Alpha equity group as the majority stakeholder. It matters little to me who they are as long as Naim keep producing the product I want at a price I want, but writing to the ceo responsible for the Vtuner decision may be a little more complex than suggested.

True. But if you look at the software development ‘partner’of airable
You will notice that they are the same used by vtuner. And the list of companies using vtuner is remarkable as well. I think it is very hard to figure out what is really going on with vtuner🤔

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I do hope the issues over the past few week or so are properly evaluated at a high level and lessons learned, so to speak.

While clearly offering thanks to Richard and Steve for their efforts and updates, I must admit to a little disappointment at the amount of deflection (spin even) to this being a Vtuner problem with which we are struggling, rather than Naim’s. After all we’ve all bought a Naim product which isn’t performing to expectation, not a Vtuner one.

By way of example, I note that even the title of this thread (the one selected for amalgamation of the others on the subject) doesn’t read ‘Naim radio service not working’.

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I think we could not leave radio to a very restricted list of providers. I’ve - like others - been googling around and there is a tendency to move to Airable from VTuner. Now, what if Airable is the last serious remaining provider…

I’ve never thought about it before so cannot propose a high level solution direction or so here, but this is something which should not be dependent on a limited number of commercial companies. This is in the end freedom of speech, democracy, politics.

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No it was not necessary here. Yesterday I needed to go through the slow route to select my preset from the normal channel list. Today all presets again work as they did until they stopped working yesterday.

It is just a commercial service. This service has shown that it was not really up for the task. So Naim must decide if they and we have to live with it in the hope that this only happens one time over the holidays, or spend or waste resources on changing internet radio service provider.

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As noted above:

Maybe vTuner is no longer a viable/sustainable platform - could Airable be the phoenix rising from the ashes?

I honestly feel any criticism of Naim in relation to this is undeserved.

vTuner has been used across the industry to aggregate these internet radio services for quite some time. If other manufacturers are shifting there may be a reason.

If there’s not some kind of disclaimer in product manuals/online documentation relating to Naim streamer usage that services provided by 3rd parties cannot be guaranteed in perpetuity I’d expect them to include that in the future.

I probably need more than a pair of hands to count the number of media boxes, DVD/BluRay players, phones/tablets which can no longer support media features they had available on release - many due to lack of software/firmware updates to support new APIs or simply that certain services failed and ceased to exist.

We can probably be thankful that we get infrequent e-mails from Naim if we’ve registered our products, but perhaps in this instance a ‘non-Naim service down’ type email to registered owners would have been helpful as I’d assume forum members are a minority of Naim owners, especially for the more lifestyle standalone devices.

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I posted yesterday that Primare had problems with Vtuner over 12 months ago. The problem appeared to be related to favourites.

I’ve recently bought a Primare streamer. The app has radio streaming section, (don’t know if they are still using VTuner) and as a back up an option to cast radio via TuneIn.

Having a backup is obviously a great idea. However, in August 23, the BBC announced live streams would no longer be available through TuneIn. So, if the main radio streamer goes tiiits up. BBC won’t be available.

So, manufacturers such as Naim are not only at the mercy of the radio streaming services but also the radio stations.

Presumably the BBC could decide not to allow streaming via Vtuner. :scream:

:atom_symbol: :atom_symbol: :atom_symbol: :atom_symbol: :atom_symbol:

I very much doubt that we will get any sort of detailed explanation from Naim as to what happened and what they will do to prevent it happening again, probably “well it’s working now so stop moaning”.
This I expect is the same response they will get from Vtuner!
Paul

Have you any idea just how big Australia is? Or the USA which is a similar size?
With multiple feeds covering a massive geographical area, just because it works (or not) on the east coast doesn’t mean it’d be working (or not) on the west coast.
In Sydney Australia here.