Alright, I've been quite critical of the EM5 software in the past, and I still am disappointed in it. So much that it's been actual months since my EM5 has last seen use.
That being said, I'm seeing some misconceptions pop up in here that I want to address.
Context: I'm a software developer (Obviously not one that works at Shanling).
The power of what, please?
Do you mean the power of the customer service dep't, or the power of Shanling Co.?
... Did you run out of good software engineers in your Country?
If something doesn't work, it should be changed.
We are not talking about sound, we are talking about software functionality, features and reliability.
Which is software is all about.
So, if the software systematically fails, than change the software, or the engineer!
As simple as that.
The Shanling account here is likely run by their community representative, which is a department that may or may not be part of the Customer Service department (in my company, they are separate departments that communicate often). It's their job to actually interact with the community on various platforms in order to make announcements, gather community sentiment about the products, and possibly help customers troubleshoot any issues they're having. They've also likely been given explicit instructions about the things they can and cannot say to the community, because they are essentially acting as the official voice of Shanling, so they can only really say things that the company wants to share. On the other side, other departments have likely been forbidden from interacting with the community because then it would be too hard to control the flow of information. It would be more likely that someone would say something controversial, or not representative of the views of Shanling, or accidentally give away some trade secret. So it's up to the community representative to act as a liaison between us (the community) and the development team.
So what does this mean? Well, it means that all the community rep can really do is take our feedback and forward it to the development team. That's all. They have no power to actually tell them what to do. They can only tell them what we want.
Alright, so we should blame the software devs then, right? Wrong. The software devs also have very little control over the tasks that they work on. There is likely some sort of project manager that is prioritizing which tasks should be worked on, and then they delegate those tasks to the software team. What gets worked on highly depends on how many software devs are available, and how much time they have to work on the next update.
I have no clue how big Shanling's software team is, but I know they have several released products currently in development and they likely need to spread out their software devs across them all (in addition to any possible unreleased products they are developing). So I wouldn't be surprised if the number of devs allocated to this product family is between 1 and 3 devs. This update was also probably a very difficult one because of Tidal's major change with deprecating MQA and introducing the MAX quality tier (which could mean MQA or Hi-Def). So most of their time was likely spent addressing that issue.
Anyway, my point is that if Shanling isn't working on the features you want them to work on, it's because the project manager doesn't agree with you for some reason. We're just a small community of people complaining on the internet, and the PM likely has access to a bunch of tracking/usage data that is driving their decisions.
My personal wishlist:
- Tidal Connect
- Better Synclink connectivity (I hate wireless projection)
- Better uPnP support
- why they can not add features that are requested and simple to implement ;
- why they keep releasing useless updates.
Unless you work at Shanling, you don't know which features are simple to implement. So it's not good to make assumptions about that. I can almost guarantee that the features we've requested on here have been forwarded to the software dev team, so they know what we want and it's likely in some backlog somewhere.
Just because an update is useless to you doesn't mean it's useless. From what I can tell, there were several improvements to Wireless Projection with this update, which is the main way that people control their units, so I'm sure some people are getting some use out of it. Also, this update finally updated the Tidal app, which means they now have access to MAX quality. So all Tidal users got something from this. It was not a useless update.
Alright, that's mostly what I had to say. I understand getting upset on the internet when you buy a product and don't get what you expected, and that's happening more and more frequently nowadays. Just make sure you direct your anger towards the right people. In this case, that is NOT the community representative. They are likely the person that's most on your side.
