Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[erviv]

Now that I have been listening to MC25 v114 on my rpi with buster as the underlying o/s I noticed that I am getting the very occasional (infrequent, once every few songs)audio drop out (or momentary freeze).  I have not done extensive listening through my library but in playing 192khz songs 8 have noticed this issue. The problem had existed in some earlier versions of raspbian, but I have not heard any audio drop outs after I had upgraded to raspbian stretch. So I don’t think this is a MC issue, but wonder if anyone else has had the same experience when going from stretch to buster, and if they found a fix.

[bob]

Now that I have been listening to MC25 v114 on my rpi with buster as the underlying o/s I noticed that I am getting the very occasional (infrequent, once every few songs)audio drop out (or momentary freeze).  I have not done extensive listening through my library but in playing 192khz songs 8 have noticed this issue. The problem had existed in some earlier versions of raspbian, but I have not heard any audio drop outs after I had upgraded to raspbian stretch. So I don’t think this is a MC issue, but wonder if anyone else has had the same experience when going from stretch to buster, and if they found a fix.

I see they just change the kernel a few days ago, that can be good or bad. Are you up to date?
What media are you playing form (SDcard, attached HD, network storage, etc)?
You might also try increasing the buffering in MC's Audio Device Options.

[erviv]

Yes, pretty certain I am up to date as I loaded everything fresh and finished with update and upgrade commands. I am playing from a HD attached to my router, with the rpi's hard wired to the router. As I mentioned the stretch based Rpi has no audio drop outs. I will give increasing the buffering a shot.
Thanks

[JimH]

... I am playing from a HD attached to my router ...

That could be the cause.

[erviv]

Jim, I doubt that it is the cause, at least not as I understand it.  I think that a change in coding in buster is the cause.  I base this on the following, this same Rpi worked without any audio drops prior to upgrading from stretch to buster. Both Rpi's used to have audio drops but these were resolved when I migrated from Jessie to Stretch.  Also my second Rpi which is wired the same way (ie to the router attached HD) is still operating on stretch and still has no audio drops. So the only change (difference) from no audio drops to having some audio drops is migrating from stretch to buster.
Again I will try increasing the buffer to see if this is a work around for the problem.

I have not seen anyone else respond that they have the same issue when migrating from stretch to buster.

[Mike Noe]

Have you tried disabling the audio in config.txt (I know pi3 has a different driver), but on the Pi4 we can dtparam=audio=off.

Then make sure your device is set correctly in MediaCenter.

[erviv]

Thanks for the suggestions. I increased buffering to 10s and still get some momentary audio freeze. I also tried, in addition, the change to config.txt. After rebooting my rpi I noticed I still have some random momentary audio freezes.
I reverted back to original configuration.
I thought I would play around with some other parameters. In Player/Options/Advanced  I unchecked Play as HDCD, and also in Player/DSPStudio I unchecked Volume Levelling.  I have not noticed any audio freezes with these changes. Coincidence or not. I might fiddle more to see if turning them back on individually makes a difference, but that is for another time.
As an aside I checked my stretch rpi to see whether these settings were checked or unchecked.  They are checked. The only other difference between the two from what I can see is that the stretch rpi is connected to a better DAC so no conversions are necessary for music above 96khz. I can't recall at the moment whether the freezes were only for music at 192khz being converted to 96khz. Again something to check for another day. Still I do know that prior to switching to buster that this music did not freeze.
So for now I am satisfied with the set up. 
I may swap out my SD card to see if the buster version works smoothly with my better DAC system, but for now I will leave that one running from stretch.

[erviv]

I have done some more extensive listening, and still get audio drop outs. The files are not high res either. I have listened extensively to my stretch rpi also and on it there have been no audio drop outs.
I am back to thing this for me is a ‘buster issue. I will wait and see how MC26 performs on my rpi’s. I think I rechecked play as Hdcd on my buster rpi, but don’t see why that should have any effect, but will uncheck it again just in case when I get a chance to play on it again, sometime this weekend perhaps.

[Sammy]

My experience with dropouts under Jessie was alleviated when I moved all my music off the USB attached drive to an SD Card.  Can't say for sure this is your problem but if you wanted to experiment you could move a few files over to the SD card and see if the problem goes away.  This does not mean that upgrading to buster didn't cause the problem.

[bob]

My experience with dropouts under Jessie was alleviated when I moved all my music off the USB attached drive to an SD Card.  Can't say for sure this is your problem but if you wanted to experiment you could move a few files over to the SD card and see if the problem goes away.  This does not mean that upgrading to buster didn't cause the problem.

This indicates an issue with the I/O bandwidth sharing between the USB drive and USB DAC.
I would make sure that you get the device setup for real-time priorities for the user account MC is running under, that could help.
There is a thread about this https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,118350.0.html

[erviv]

Thanks Bob. I had already set the thread priorities per your attached link.  I did this although I thought that recent versions of MC took care of thread priorities automatically.
I still get audio drop outs occasionally. It could very well be a communication issue between my rpi and the network attached drive, that has shown up in buster.  My impression is that my rpi is running hotter under buster, so i expect that the resource utilization under buster is causing the issue. The problem still doesn’t manifest itself when running stretch.
Moving my library to an SD card is not an option.