aaron57, I share some of your pain. Maybe not in the exact same ways, but similarly. Some of it may be operator error, but I don’t think it all is.
I have a Picroft with the latest stable version (September 2018). I have re-imaged it several times as well. It always takes tweaking with the audio drivers to make it functional. This was discussed and recognized as an issue several months ago, but no updated stable version has been released.
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I don’t have audio issues like yours. Mine is almost the opposite. It triggers on all sorts of works that are no where near to “Hey Mycroft”. I switched to “Hey Jarvis” and it still triggers as I listen to videos, online classes, podcasts, etc.
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I don’t use emby, but Pandora is functional for me.
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I had the “please wait a moment” issue a few days ago and was able to tinker with it following the forum topic: Skills not loading / Please wait a moment as I finish booting up.
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Bummer. I have been there, too.
Some other issues:
After a reboot, the volume level is usually at zero and I have to reset.
Skills frequently get left behind with upgrades and changes. First was the upgrade to Python 3 and several skills that were useful stopped working. Then the upgrade to 19 left the podcast-skill and the Internet Radio skill behind. I realize that these are user developed and probably not officially recognized, but it still is no fun to find something useful fall by the wayside with no work-around. Probably just a result of the open source nature of the project.
The effort required to make things work, while OK for hobbyists, gets old after a while. Having to check the Documentation, then the Community Forum and the Mattermost channels to find tips and tricks for normal functioning is frustrating and time consuming. Plus, if you have to reimage, you have to go through it all again.
I, too, really want to make it work and usually tolerate the chaos, but from time to time have to leave it alone to regain sanity.