I've been experimenting streaming FLAC from various UPnP servers controlled by a separate UPnP control point running on Android, with the rendering being on my Naim. Control points seem to be a weak point in the chain. Maybe that's because they haven't been a big issue until recently, or perhaps it's because they have interfaces "pointing both ways", but for whatever reason it seems quite hard to get them to play well with renderers and servers.

After a while I got bored with using the remote control and the little green screen on my Naim to suck music from my UPnP server - it's just a little bit too fiddly. I ended up using the excellent Media Monkey to play FLAC, and then send the output out of the optical feed on my sound card to the Naim UPnP player.

That's fine, but then I happened to listen to the player again direct, using streamed FLAC. I noticed straight away that the sound was better when the Naim does the decoding rather than when Media Monkey did it on the PC.

I did suspect I'd turned into a hi-fi moron, but the difference was definitely noticeable and not just the level, it was more complicated than that.

"...there's no action left in this keyboard."

Almost all modern computer keyboards start out with no action.

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I used Simile Timeline for the second time on ASP.NET the other day. The Simile Timeline documentation is a bit sparse, but the Google Group supporting it is good.

There's lots of stuff out there on Google about using Simile Timeline with ASP.NET specifically, but as usual much of it is wrong. As a probably pointless attempt to counter those who spend their time copying incorrect data around the internet, here's some correct data about using Simile Timeline on ASP.NET 3.5.

This stuff actually works, and I know because I built it and sold it to someone. If you're in the class of sad copiers, don't forget to correct my spelling mistakes when you steal this.

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