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[aynsof]

Memo from the Chair, Department of Wits’ End:
Hello All,
I’m an avid user/upgrader of JRiver. After 5 years, I’m still finding amazing features.

Last year I moved from a shoebox to a whole house, and have expanded my internal network to four machines from two.

When I use the media network over wifi now, I very often get stuck in the digital equivalent of a “locked groove”; about a second or two before a track change, an “A Clockwork Orange”-like torture device of pulsing rhythm, that requires me to use remote desktop from my phone and restart JRiver on the offending machine.

It doesn’t always happen, but eventually, it typically does.

I have tried a wifi booster, I have tried closing JRiver on the machines I am not using, I have tried sending a lossy signal from the server.

The only correlation I have found is this: it happens on my two laptops, but never on my desktop, and never on my phone. The laptops are crummy, weak machines, I should add.

Any advice on how to solve my issue would be much appreciated!

[JimH]

Data has stopped arriving somewhere.  Wifi connection weak, for example.  Try moving equipment closer, just to test.

Please describe your setup, including OS's and devices.

[aynsof]

Thank you very much for your reply. I have four machines in my network. Server is a desktop. I have two laptops; the laptops, please recall, are giving me the trouble of "locking up" as files are about to switch.

laptop 1: 12 feet from server, no walls, HP, 2.4 GHz processor, 12GB RAM
laptop 2: 25 feet from server, one wall,  Ideapad, 2.21 GHz, processor, 4 GB RAM

Windows 10 on all machines.

Meanwhile, I followed your advice and moved the laptops (one at a time) 2 meters from the server (times being what they are!!), and set them on shuffle play. The result? No problems at all. They played for hours with no lock-ups. I restarted the machines several times, and still, they played fine. But when I moved them back to their "homes", I encountered the lock-up problem once again.

So it seems that they are simply not receiving a strong enough signal. I went online and learned how to make a few adjustments to the receptors' wifi settings, but nothing has helped. I would greatly appreciate suggestions on how to proceed. Maybe invest in a mesh?

Thank you again, and please stay safe.

[dtc]

A little more testing may be in order, before going the mesh route. A laptop 12 feet away and with no walls should work fine.

Try a few simple things.

Run Speedtest - available as an app on mobile devices or go to speedtest.net on your PCs.  It can show you now much your signal is falling off over distance.  Run it on the server and on the client.  I use it on my phone all the time to check what bandwidth I have.  Running it on your phone and on your laptops will help you understand if there is an issue with your laptop wifi.

Are you using 2.4G or 5G for the wireless? 5G is usually faster, but does not carry as well.  If your router allows it, you might split them if they are not already.  If 2.4G and 5G are under the same SSID, devices are suppose to select the best one, but it does not always work well.

Get an app to analyze your WiFi strength.  I use an Android app called WiFI Analyzer, but there are a lot out there. The idea is to see what the signal strength is on both 2.4G and 5G and also to see if moving things around helps.

I had one spot with low signal strength so got a $15 TP-Link 2.4G range extender (N300) and it solved the problem. But note, range extenders, especially cheap ones, can boost the signal strength but lower the speed.  But playing music does not require a lot of speed, so signal strength may be more important.

You could also look into a usb WiFi adapter.

I suggest doing some analysis. As I said, a laptop 12 feet away with no ways should not be a problem, unless you have incredible low bandwidth.

[aynsof]

Thanks for your reply (been busy with other hobbies...). Some answers and further developments follow

A little more testing may be in order, before going the mesh route. A laptop 12 feet away and with no walls should work fine.

Try a few simple things.

Run Speedtest - available as an app on mobile devices or go to speedtest.net on your PCs.  It can show you now much your signal is falling off over distance.  Run it on the server and on the client.  I use it on my phone all the time to check what bandwidth I have.  Running it on your phone and on your laptops will help you understand if there is an issue with your laptop wifi.

ANSWER: about 15 Mbps on wifi'd machines

Are you using 2.4G or 5G for the wireless? 5G is usually faster, but does not carry as well.  If your router allows it, you might split them if they are not already.  If 2.4G and 5G are under the same SSID, devices are suppose to select the best one, but it does not always work well.

ANSWER: I switched to 2.4

Get an app to analyze your WiFi strength.  I use an Android app called WiFI Analyzer, but there are a lot out there. The idea is to see what the signal strength is on both 2.4G and 5G and also to see if moving things around helps.

I had one spot with low signal strength so got a $15 TP-Link 2.4G range extender (N300) and it solved the problem. But note, range extenders, especially cheap ones, can boost the signal strength but lower the speed.  But playing music does not require a lot of speed, so signal strength may be more important.

You could also look into a usb WiFi adapter.

I suggest doing some analysis. As I said, a laptop 12 feet away with no ways should not be a problem, unless you have incredible low bandwidth.

Odd new developments: My client desktop experienced a scary crash recently; it took several hard shutdowns/restarts to get it up and running again. Since then, MC26 has been behaving quite a bit better, though by no means perfectly (still getting "locked grooves" occasionally at the end of tracks). Also--and this is new--sometimes the audio begins to skip a few deciseconds all of a sudden, and I have to restart the player. However--and this is the really weird part--if I open the server machine remotely (through Chrome Remote Desktop), the skipping ceases. Very strange!

Finally I should have said from the outset that I typically control the media server from a wifi'd client, using MC's "play there" option, and the server, in turn, sends the signal, again wirelessly, to a third machine for actual playback. Is it possible I am taxing the system this way? Many thanks as always!

[wer]

What you describe is consistent with an audio driver problem.  When the driver malfunctions it will continuously repeat the last bit of sound in its buffer.  Try upgrading or downgrading the audio driver, or if you have the option, try a different audio device to see if the problem disappears.

[aynsof]

Hi Wer, thanks for your suggestion. Drivers on all machine are (and have been) up to date. Problems persists :-(...

[wer]

But you didn't actually try my suggestion.  That's your prerogative, but what I said was:

Try upgrading or downgrading the audio driver

It would be a mistake to assume the latest driver is always the best.  That is often not the case.

Good luck.

[aynsof]

Ah, sorry, yes I reverted to old drivers too, if it was on my computer. I will check manufacturers' sites too now. Thanks!

[aynsof]

Regress and Progress

First,thanks to those who have offered suggestions on how to remedy my ongoing issue (recall, tracks often do not advance, and instead get hung up by repeating the last bit of the ending track).

More recently, when I do get through a playlist (typically, an album) without it crashing, the playlist repeats the last track and/or repeats the whole playlist. “Repeat” is turned off everywhere; the host, the client, and in Gizmo. so things have gotten worse!

Now, upon a time-consuming trial and error procedure, I have determined that my problems arise ONLY when I am controlling things from Gizmo (playing TO Gizmo has always been fine). Controlling the host from the host, fine; controlling the host from a client, fine; controlling a client from the host, fine; controlling a client from another client, fine. My issue seems to be Gizmo related.

So, I splurged on JRemote2, but alas, the problem remains. Still, now that I know the problem has something to do with controlling JRiver from my phone, perhaps someone knows what might be going on, and offer a fix?

Regards,

[bob]

Have you upgraded your build past 26.0.73? There was an issue with devices that support SetNextAVTransportURI (like MC) that was fixed in that build and later.

[aynsof]

Thanks for chiming in. Yes, all my machines are kept religiously up to date. The problem existed in MC25 as well.

[JimH]

Try toggling Set next now.

[aynsof]

Hi, thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately I'm having trouble parsing it. I don't know where a "Set" "or "set next" toggle is. It's not in JRemote2, nor can I find it in JRiver. Can I trouble you to provide more specific instructions? Thanks in advance.

[Scobie]

In MediaCenter, if you right click on the DLNA renderer in question, it is under "DLNA Controller Options".

[aynsof]

Scobie! Over 48 hours of playing and everything is working fine (with one instance of a "locked groove" that I suspect was due to an independent factor)! Thank you so much for helping me out of this very frustrating situation. If you're so inclined (and I certainly understand if you're not), perhaps you can tell me what the issue was, how your remedy fixed it, and why the solution is buried so deep inside the MC interface. Again, many thanks!!

[Scobie]

Ok that's great news, well done. To be fair both Bob and Jim came up with the idea...I just pointed you to the command but happy to help.

The DLNA setup within MC can be a bit intimidating but once you get your head around how it all hangs together it starts to be quite intuitive. Have a look at the Wiki topic as a good starter at https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DLNA .

As you've found there is more than one area to set DLNA options; one is in in the regular Tools -> Options -> Media Network where the DLNA servers themselves are configured allowing for the configuration of media file types, transcoding,  DSP settings and all things MC lets you control. Another is via the Playing Now area of the MC home screen where configuration options for the Renderers themselves are set up, and these are more non-MC specific configs as they pertain more to the actual hardware you are integrating with. This is also where you tie to 2 areas together via the "Associate with DLNA server" option.

The particular setting you found is in the second area as it is renderer specific and is probably the first thing to look at if it is behaving strangely in terms of how it actually parses the files. If it plays the first parts of a file and then skips, or of it repeats files or odd playback issues like that. What this setting is actually doing is telling MC whether your renderer supports the SetNextAVtransport method, which is used for gapless playback among other things in a DLNA/UPnP system. Media Center has no way of knowing (at this stage anyway, there are calls for this functionality to be implemented) whether your renderer supports this or not, so it can be a bit of trial and error, and the same goes for the other settings found there but they don't tend to need to be changed as often.

The DLNA guru in these forums is AndrewFG and he has an excellent tool that can analyse your media network and advise on DLNA settings, based on what your renderers actually report: Whitebear Digital Media Renderer Analyser - http://www.whitebear.ch/dmra .

Cheers

[JimH]

Bob may comment, but I believe the renderer does report whether it supports SetNext, but it sometimes says it does but doesn't.  That's why setting it manually works.

[Scobie]

You’re most likely right Jim. I was referring to AndrewFG having suggested a few times that MC should query the renderer as part of the setup. Maybe it has actually been implemented, I’m not sure.

But yes I agree that sometimes what the renderer reports is not necessarily the case.

Cheers