GentooPlayer - A saga of misery

Hello,

As the title suggests this post is about my horrible experience with GentooPlayer. Interestingly the horrible experience is about my interaction with Filippo Racioppi, who is the owner/brain/developer behind the Gentoo Player & not the GentooPlayer itself.

So to give little background GentooPlayer is the operating system based on the Gentoo Linux which is optimized for audio playback & it's not a player like Roon or Jriver media Center etc. I have lot of fellow audiophiles who are using it & are very happy with the improvements that it brings out. Since I use Merging NADAC, the drivers I am using are Ravenna. In mid of 2023 Merging announced support of Ravenna on Linux and subsequently GentooPlayer also added Ravenna support in Gentoo Player (hence forth called as GP).

So last week I went ahead with trial of GP. I took help of one of my friend who is extensively familiar with Linux & works in cybersecurity, to install the GP on my desktop. After installation was successful, we went ahead to install Ravenna drivers & nvidia drivers which are needed for my RTX 30360 to upsample everything to DSD 256. After installing both we ran into issue & no playback was happening through Roon or HQplayer (which I was using in Windows for more than a year). My friend tried to do some troubleshooting but he was not able to resolve the issue as Ravenna drivers were failing to initiate.

So I wrote to to GP support & Filippo responded to me and resolved my issue of Ravenna drivers failing. But when I tested the playback I was getting horrible amount of dropouts while playing anything even at it's native rate. Then I checked my Ravenna driver settings in Windows and replicated them in Linux and it resolved the problem to some extent where frequency of dropouts reduced by large amount. But the issue was still there. I informed Filippo about this but he said that he doesn't have any knowledge of Ravenna so he can't do anything to resolve my issue.

But since I was very much determined to make it work, I wrote to Merging for any help on this issue knowing that in the past they had clearly stated that they won't be providing any support for Linux related issues. And as per my expectations Merging denied providing any support on the issue.

But I was still adamant on making things work & hence went ahead with tinkering of my own. GP has different kernels and only few are supported by Ravenna as per it's official documentation. I was using the supported kernel. After installing the nvidia driver it was compiling the drivers at the kernel level & creating a new kernel for it. So for my tinkering I chose the supported kernel where nvidia drivers were not compiled. And to my surprise the playback was very smooth. Then I decided to try my usual full DSD 256 up-scaling using HQPlayer & that also worked perfect without any dropout.

I informed Filippo about playback working perfectly fine on non-nvidia driver compiled kernel. Since I was using trial, it was for just one week & I almost exhausted my entire trial period in getting things working. So I requested Filipo to extend my trial period by one week.

Now this where my misery started, even though through my perseverance I made things work well the further experience was something opposite of what we expect from any service provider.

Filippo turned down my request of extending my trial period & told me to return to Windows as he cannot provide support for various issues that I was having. To this I told him that since I have managed to make things run smoothly, I will not ask for any support (I was ready to forgo the support) & was ready to pay the cost for his license. Since his method of purchase was through donation via PayPal & Credit Cards which don't work in my country (India) & also in some other countries, I asked him for the contact where I can directly transfer via PayPal.

But he even refused to provide the ID & said I will be responsible for my actions. So I asked for help from my friends who are using GP. One of them said that he has the id of Filippo and he has paid directly for himself as well as several others. Hence he offered me help by transferring directly to the ID, to which i agreed.

So my friend transferred the money to the account to which Filippo immediately replied in a very rude way. I had my friend intervene in the situation but Filippo still continued his unprofessional & arrogant behavior.

Now if one was to analyze the entire chain events one can clearly see following things.
 

1. GP was not ready to provide the support when there was issue with his product where it was not able to compile the nvidia drivers & Ravenna drivers correctly. Just because his customer base having Ravenna driver was small he was just not ready to provide any support inspite of his product having issues & not the Ravenna drivers.
2. In-spite of the issues with GP I was ready to forgo the support and go ahead with purchase of the license which I had clearly communicated to Filippo. Still he continued to deny on providing me the license.
3. I was having the issue with payment method which he has set-up & he has complete knowledge of the issue. Despite of multiple request there was no solution or work-around provided by Filippo. When I took help of my friend who is also having GP license, he became infuriated and behave even more rudely.
4. Filippo was behaving unprofessionally over my friend directly transferring money to his PayPal account while he has accepted the money for many users from my country through my friend's account. How discriminatory & double standard behavior!

In the end Filippo said that he has blocked my hardware so that I won't be able to use GP in the future (which in any way I am not going to do after such horrible experience).

If one want to know how not to treat your customers then this is the perfect example of such behavior. No matter how good your product is one cannot treat customer in such rude, discriminatory fashion.

May my experience be a warning for a lot of audiophiles regarding potential downfalls of this route.

Regards,
Audio_phool