How to Use Manic Moose Software on BDP Music Players

Part 1: How To Use Bryston BDP Software, Manic Moose

Drew Baird, CEO of Moon-Audio.com explains and compares some of his favorite portable headphone amplifiers and DACs, including Cypher Labs -dB and -R, iQube v3, JH Audio JH3A and JH16 IEMs, Centrance HiFi M8, and Sony PHA-1.

Part 2

Drew Baird, CEO of Moon-Audio.com explains and compares some of his favorite portable headphone amplifiers and DACs, including Cypher Labs -dB and -R, iQube v3, JH Audio JH3A and JH16 IEMs, Centrance HiFi M8, and Sony PHA-1.

Part 3

Drew Baird, CEO of Moon-Audio.com explains and compares some of his favorite portable headphone amplifiers and DACs, including Cypher Labs -dB and -R, iQube v3, JH Audio JH3A and JH16 IEMs, Centrance HiFi M8, and Sony PHA-1.

Transcript

Hey, this is Drew Baird from Moon Audio and I'm here with Gary Dayton from Bryston and we're gonna go through the ins and outs of the BDP-3 software, how to add music from hard drives, how to connect to Tidal. We're gonna try and cover as much as possible in a cohesive manner without getting too complicated, so I'll turn it over to Gary and enjoy.

All right. I'm Gary Dayton with Bryston. The software that we use for all of our BDP digital players, including the legacy BDP-1 and BDP-2, which is no longer produced, it's called Manic Moose. So this Manic Moose software included our user interface design and the back end audio system and the audio playback software that we use to get music going.

Once you get your new BDP-3 or BDP-pi unpacked and set up on the network, the first thing that you need to do is go out and locate it. So using the BDP is as simple as using any web-enabled device, so that can be a computer -- a Windows computer like we're using here, a Mac, iPad, Android, iOS -- you pick.

The way you find your BDP on the network is to go to my.bryston.com, a specialized webpage that we use to look on your network and find any Bryston device. Here we see that we found the BDP-3 on the Moon Audio network, so we can click that link and pull up the dashboard for the BDP-3.

Let's first take a look around the dashboard and get familiar with what's what. Up at the top, there's a persistent transport area, so wherever you are on the BDP you always have the ability to stop, start, skip tracks, and scrub through tracks. If you're in settings, regardless if a nasty track comes on that you don't like, press stop, and if you need to get some music going right away you know press play.

On the top left we've got a few control links: update, clear, consume, eject. Update is your magic button to add new music to your BDP. Whenever you add new music on your external hard drive, your NAS, or however you've got music connected to your BDP, simply click update. It'll rescan any recognized drives and add that new music to your library.

Clear will clear a playlist. Consume is a special function we'll go over once we get into media player, and if you have a Bryston BOT-1 optical drive connected to your BDP you've got an eject, but that will let you spit a disk out. Top right corner you've got media player, and then at the bottom, you've got a group of settings that you can use to to access specific functions.

B radio is a nice feature that lets you access internet radio and playback method lets you choose between MPD, which is the stock music player. Roon Ready -- all BDPs are Roon Ready devices -- share port sync is a way to bounce audio over from an iOS device so the BDP will show up as an Airplay target, and there are a few more settings as well.

Why don't we start with media player and get familiar with how to play music. So this is the media player section of Manic Moose. The media player is how you play music. This is divided up into, again, four sections. You've got the transport controls at the top, you've got a Now Playing list down the left-hand side, this is where your cue shows up. On the right-hand side you have access to your library, and in the middle, this is where you get album art and this tells you what's going on with your currently playing track.

So how are we gonna get some music going? Let's take a look at the library here. You see we've got a drive plugged in via USB called 'Untitled,' so I can click on 'Untitled.' I've got a directory that contains some music. I will play George Benson, so if I want to add the entire George Benson folder I can simply click the plus by it. If I want to clear that, I can clear. If I want to look inside George Benson and see, you know, what tracks we have what albums we have. We can individually add tracks if we like simply by pressing the plus button beside.

Now remember that this interface looks just the same on a Windows computer as it does on iOS or Android. Now, once we've got a playlist stacked up to get it going just simply press play. We'll have album art pop up, you've got information about the track down here at the bottom. This tells you what your bitrate is so this is a flat file.

It's track one of four in our playlist and the sample rate is 96k. It's a 24-bit file, two channels. What if we want to rearrange the playlist? Well, this is easy. We can simply grab a track and move it into another position on the playlist. If I'm not a fan of a track and I want to get rid of it but continue with the rest of the playlist, I can just grab that track number drag it off to the middle section and that goes away.

If I want to save a playlist -- maybe I've stacked up quite a few tracks in a playlist I want to use for a party -- I can simply hit save, give it a title, and it shows up in my playlists. So there's a lot of different ways you can manipulate the queue. The biggest takeaway here is that with the BDP you're not directly playing music out of the library, you're always building playlists. It's only a permanent playlist if you save it, it's temporary if you just stack things up in the queue.

Now there's a function in the BDP that limits the number of songs that you can put here in the queue at any given time and this is to prevent you from thinking the BDP's locked up if you accidentally try and add your entire Drive to a playlist.

That function is down here in BDP settings, music player, daemon settings. Currently, the limit is 300. If I want to add more tracks at a time I can simply change that to 3,000 or something else. Hit save and be good to go. You probably want to keep this, on a BDP3, to under about 10,000 tracks total. On a BDP-pi or an older generation unit I think 5,000 is about as much as it can tolerate at any one given time. But you know, once you've got 5,000 tracks in there, that's a days-long playlist, so you can run a random playlist out of 5,000 tracks and not hear the same thing twice for [a couple months] for a couple of months, yeah.

Okay, so back to Media Player. Let's get a little more familiar with what's going on. So I'm going to stop this track, I'm going to clear the playlist and add something else. So in addition to browsing by file structure, this is how music is arranged on your drive. You can browse by genre, artist, album, album artist, et cetera.

So you've got a lot of different ways to sort. If I want to browse by album you see I get a different entry for every album we've got on the drive, and naturally here we're using a small drive just to make demonstrations nice and quick. But again, just like our first demonstration, we simply have to hit the play button beside any one of these to add music to the queue.

Now a special entry here is playlists you saw that I made a party playlist a few moments ago. If I want to add a playlist I simply go into playlists, add that. Now there's a special case playlist called Audio CD.

Whenever you have a BOT-1, a Bryston BOT-1 connected, you can do three things with it. One: you can play CDs. Two: you can rip CDs. The BOT-1 makes it very easy to rip your CD collection to a hard drive. And three: you can build a playlist from your local library and burn that off to the blank CD.

So let's start with just playing a CD. Clear my current playlist, add audio CD. So this brings up Space Oddity, David Bowie disc we've got inserted. Once the disc is recognized, you'll have an entry right here at the top of the page that lets you listen to that disc. So once the disc is inserted in the BOT-1 it treats it just like any other track. It'll search the internet for album artwork and meta data and will spin right up and play. Once I'm done with the CD, I simply hit clear. Clears the playlist and we're ready to add more music.

So default view is a great way of browsing your music library if you are a text-based thinker, if you've got a well-organized hard drive that has music sorted by album artist and then album. If you like to browse through a list of genres, artists, albums, et cetera, Default View is great.

If you prefer a more graphical view of your music library, use Artist View. So up here in the top right corner we click the icon for Artist View and it takes us to a unique and graphical view for the library. Here down the left-hand side we have a list of all of the artists that are recognized. Click any one artist and it pulls up albums that are on your drive by that artist.

In this case we've clicked George Benson. The BDP will search the MusicBrainz database online to pull down information about George Benson. So you can click on a description, it will give you some details about the artist, you can even link to the artist's homepage or a Wikipedia entry if you want more information about that artist. Close the windows when you're done.

There are different tabs that appear under Artist View. Any time you click on an artist it will search the internet for that information. So albums is the default tab. Here you see we've got Breezin'. Similar artists gives you a list of other artists that you might enjoy if you also enjoy George Benson. You can automatically build radio stations based on that artist. And then as information is pulled down from Tidal we will see any missing releases by that artist and at least the Tidal albums will be generated automatically. So back to the albums tab. If we want to listen to Breezin' we simply have to click the play button by that album. It's automatically added to our playlist and it starts playing back right away.

If we want to listen to an individual track, simply click the track. You know, it's automatically added to the playlist and starts playing. Now you can also click and hold a track to get a few different options on how to manipulate it. If you want to play it now, play now, add it next in your current queue, you can do that, add it to the end of your current queue or if you simply want to play the album from that track on, you can do that. If you want to play the album at random you can shuffle all songs. So as you can see you've got lots of different options from Artist View.

Once you have a playlist or a queue built and you simply want to, you know, play within that queue you can use Song View. Song View just generates a nice table of all of the tracks queued up. The currently playing track has a play symbol beside it, the next track has a letter 'N' with a circle around it, and at any point you can click one of these tracks to get it playing.