DS audio Reviews

I have a Synology NAS ds3018xs on which I installed Audio Station, a Synology product. I have 600 GB of music on it, all FLAC, ALAC, MP3s. I’ve used DS Audio for months to access the music and sometimes use DS File to maintain the library. DS Audio has worked without a hitch. Love it. I run it on my phone out and about and am able to stream CD quality lossless to a B1 Audioengine BT device which can pass lossless through its optical out to my Bifrost DAC at home. From the NAS I can also play directly out the USB 3.0 port on the back of the NAS directly to my Bifrost DAC. I also have roon, plex, Tidal, and others. DS Audio is straight forward and simple and my preferred way to play music. It took me a bit to learn DSaudio and a bit to get the NAS up just the way I wanted it. I don’t have any faults to report. There is a good user community, accurate documentation, and years of usage if you get stuck.

Listen, it’s a great app. I use it to listen to music all the time and have little problems. But, lately, a REALLY big bug has surfaced and has not been fixed. Clicking the “play next to current” button, which conveniently allows the track to play after the one you’re currently listening to, makes the whole app crash. Just that button, but it’s a very important button. If you click on it, regardless of the song, or situation, your app will go down. Please fix it, and you will be granted five stars.

I appreciate the team creating such a great app with awesome potential. I still can’t sign with quick connect on network. I can connect only on my wifi. I thought initially it was problem with my network, but I can remotely access photos and other apps. I even changed our router but still can’t sign up. Please fix it. Thank you

Update: it started working today. Not sure what happened. Only other recommendation is make menu and icons more modern.

Thanks so much!

If Synology invested time and resources to develop DS Audio, their NAS would be a must-have for music lovers. I’ve been using DSaudio every day and it already is extremely usable. Well, until few days ago. Now DSaudio doesn’t allow changing the “player” setting and actually freezes when opening that setting, at least on iPad - this makes it unusable to me.

I use DSaudio as a control point for my home hifi when at home, and to listen via headphones when out. Without being able to switch the player setting from USB Speakers to headphones and vice versatility, DSaudio is useless for me. Everything used to work for many years until now.

DS Audio has so much promise.

First off, nothing I do or change seems to let me log in with https turned on. Second, there are some very basic things missing which are available in the Audio Station desktop UI which make this imminently less usable: no recently added section, you can’t change the sort order in any view, and there’s no search. I wish DSaudio was more useful because I’d love to see it become my new standard, but when DSaudio is this old and this immature, I can tell I’m better off searching for an alternative.

I love that I can stream exactly what content I want, even specific albums on my NAS. The problem with DSaudio is that if you’re running it through Bluetooth on your phone, once you get out and back in the car, DSaudio makes you reconnect and doesn’t remember previous status, even if you don’t close DSaudio . Plus it doesn’t buffer all that efficiently, so if you run into a dead spot DSaudio stops playing, then makes you log back in once you get the signal back. All this makes it way to inconvenient to use.

I have been using this a lot more since Pandora is so ad crazy. Lately, it loses its place if stopped for more than a couple of minutes. And it doesn’t do a very good job of grouping songs into albums. Sometimes all but a couple are in one album and one or two are in another album with same photo and names. Shuffle and default favorites stop playing and I have to advance the song a few seconds to start it again.

From what other reviewers are saying it sounds like unrealistic expectations, user error or bad audio files (that’s to be expected if you steal music online). I uploaded all my lossless ripped albums and iTunes purchases to my Synology and DSaudio works perfectly. No problems with gaps, no album name issues, no problems at all so far. I do have one complaint and that is the lack of a EQ, but it’s not a deal breaker by any means.

DSaudio is great for very simple music playing but horrible for audio books. It can’t keep track of any order or history so audio books are horrible to use with it. It doesn’t have any quick jump forward or backward to find spots and it constantly logs you out and resets the track if you pause the audio for too long (couple of minutes). Has some improvement to make it a great app but like I said for a basic music player it’s ok.

So i love DSaudio. I love what it does. I hate that it’s so cluttered with unnecessary and inconsistent behaviors. ESPECIALLY on the carplay app.

In carplay, i should be able to navigate easily to songs, albums, artists, playlists etc but i can’t do any of that.

It’s extremely difficult to use in the car and dangerous as it encourages you to use it on your phone instead.

The pins are where DSaudio shines. However, it still needs basic functions. I would love to talk to the devs to give my opinions on what they should do to improve ds audio because it could be the reason people buy Synology’s Nas for their lossless and other such music collection to avoid streaming services

Mini player bar in app allows you to brows while it plays and lots of playlist options. Still can improve but getting to be a decent music player. Maybe an option to remember fully last state it was in.

Great to have a free app for my synoAudio. Thanks for that. I use DSaudio quite a bit. Almost daily. Problem for me is takes too long to log in, sometimes I tell it to repeat a song but it skips to next. Also, I get the whole color theme thing for the other synoApps but the color choice for this one is not so great from a design perspective.

Other than that, it a must have for synology and will keep on using either way.

It would be nice if you could change the default window DSaudio boots into. Also, I'd like if there were the option to keep yourself logged in while DSaudio isn't playing but is still open in the background. Other than those things, DSaudio works quite well.

Although that I had put songs in the same folder, they still can’t appear as one album. Another big issue is, some Chinese file names are not displayed correctly, and you can’t rename them in DSaudio . Please add rename function.

I tried to correct through album info, no use.

Really hard to use for CarPlay without having auto-login. I want to use DS audio to get to music on my server that’s not on my phone. You have to pick up phone and go through login to get to your library. You have auto-login (“Remember Me” setting) for “DS file” and “DS cam” apps, please do same for this one!

The description says it needs “Audio Station” installed for all features to work. In fact, it requires this for any features to work!

It caches 2GB by default, so be sure to fix that.

It’s surprisingly slow to list my tracks. Viewing the same music library from iTunes on my Mac is far faster, on the same network. I guess it uses different fields for classifying music than iTunes, because the views are pretty different, too.

The transcoding options are not clear, and the help is not helpful.

But it works. It does play my music.

After seeing so many poor reviews of all the Synology DS apps, they now all seem functional and quite quick with DSM 7. The DRIVE app esp took some work to get up and running, prob because the NAS was indexing when I first updated. Big improvement over login probs etc under DSM 6.

DSaudio could easily be a great App and serious replacement for iTunes. Unfortunately, one big feature has been left out and that is an easy way to Sync your entire music library. I’ve had to resort to making a playlist with all my music and playing continuously trying to keep DSaudio in the foreground as there is no background refresh.

I used to be able to stream via Chromecast Audio. This version cannot do that although on the screen it says it could. ****Update on Nov 1, 2021 The latest version 5.16.3 still hasn’t fixed the Chromecast issue.

DSaudio is great, but I am seeing some things that could use some improving or changes. Currently I do not see an option to create playlists. You should also be able to edit and add tracks to playlists. I also would like a way to scroll through my library by song rather than just artist/album.

Is alright but needs to be able to create playlists. Additionally, every time DSaudio opens it starts at the top of the albums or band list. I wish it remembered where i was last time so I don’t have to scroll all the time.

For anyone out there who was holding off on iOS 14 because of the bugs in DS Audio, I’m happy to report that Synology’s latest update has fixed both. DSaudio is usable again!

Sure it’s missing many premium features. But it’s a pretty nice app if you have a ton of Audio on your NAS. Lots of cool radio stations too. Must have if you own a Synology nas.

When I used DSaudio in CarPlay and come back the next morning, it shows that it’s logging in. I can log in on the phone, and the CarPlay display still shows logging in. If I start another music app, it can’t take the place of the ds audio app on the display. It’s like it crashed and won’t release.

My only complaint is that modifying a playlist (deleting a song) is not intuitive. Other than that, it works well!

It’s a great app. I have been using it for years and for years, you only had to sign in once a day. Now, for some reason, it logs you off when you stop using it, even for a minute. Hoping this can be fixed.