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[HamishNorton]

I need to be able to play a few seconds of silence whenever I start JRiver MC29 from a stopped state (not needed from a pause or between tracks), but "play silence at startup" only triggers when the program is starting up or the sample rate changes. Does anyone have any ideas for a workaround? Could I humbly request an option to trigger playing silence whenever restarting from a stopped state?

[JimH]

That setting should do what you want.  Try increasing the time.

If not, what are you playing and what are you playing it to?

[HamishNorton]

The existing setting only plays silence when MC29 is playing for the first time since program startup or is playing a file with a different sample rate. It doesn't matter how many seconds of silence I set, the silence doesn't play when I start playing from a stopped state, but it is not the first file played since program start.

My Rube Goldberg setup is windows 11 pc with Silex SX Virtual Link connecting to a DS 600 Silex USB hub over an ethernet-based LAN, connecting to a Topping U90 USB bridge, connecting over AES EBU to a pair of Dutch & Dutch 8C's.

If I didn't have to do it this way I wouldn't. It sounds glorious after the first few seconds! The Topping U90 takes care of all the timing hash caused by the Silex. I am playing flac files of varying sample rates. The sample rate doesn't affect this problem, except that the silence does play when the sample rate changes.

[JimH]

Oh boy.

[HamishNorton]

I must modify my comments a bit after some more experimentation. If the program is in a stopped state for a few minutes, then the silence plays and all is well. I can probably live with this. But it is odd that whether the silence plays or not is somewhat unreliable from a stopped state.

[JimH]

Are you really stopping MC?  Not just pausing it?

[JimH]

I added some links to the equipment you list.

So, if I understand, you're using software on the computer to output audio to USB, then connecting via Ethernet to another device that converts it back to USB and then USB ...

I'm dizzy trying to follow. 

------------

Your speakers are "active" and have an Ethernet port.  Do they support DLNA / UPnP?  I looked a little and couldn't see it.

[HamishNorton]

I am stopping MC, not just pausing it, and the silence is definitely unreliable as to whether it plays or not. The longer I wait, the more reliable it is. My signal path is MC playing through the ASIO driver of the Topping U90 USB - AES EBU bridge. for the signal to get to the Topping U90, it has to go through the SX Virtual Link software, through an Ethernet-based LAN, and to a Silex DS 600 USB hub that gets its data from the SX Virtual Link software over the LAN. The AES EBU signal from the Topping U90 goes to the Dutch & Dutch 8C's. It all works well, except for about the first 3 seconds while it is all getting synchronized and puts out hash. Why do I subject myself to this absurdly indirect signal path? It is because I am not allowed to keep a computer in the room with the speakers, and the DS 600 USB hub fits in a drawer and doesn't dissipate much heat. So I can have my desktop computer running MC29 in my office and control the speakers with JRemote. The speakers support streaming over Roon (which I don't have) but do not, at least not yet, support streaming over DLNA/ UPNP. DLNA would be the obvious way to go here.

By the way, if I pause MC, there is no problem with the sound when I start playing. The problem is only after a full stop.

[JimH]

Another solution in the future might be to use a JRiver Id or similar and put that in the drawer.  Then you'd play from your existing computer to the JRiver Id, with MC on both sides.  The Raspberry Pi model would probably work.

[HamishNorton]

I expect that you are correct!

[HamishNorton]

I had MC29 stopped (not paused) for several hours and the 10 seconds of silence, which was specified, did not play. When I stopped it and played a track again, still no silence. When I stopped it and played the track a third time, the silence played. I do think there is a bug here.

[JimH]

We'll check, but it's possible your setup is dropping the silence.

[dtc]

I tried setting 10 and 15 seconds of silence and it worked for me. I tried stopping and restarting and also waiting a while for restarting. It always waited the appropriate time.

Can you try it with a standard setup, like with the built-in sound card/chip only.  Can you try WASAPI instead of ASIO?

[blgentry]

Perhaps a low tech approach would help:

Instead of stopping, just pause.  If you are on a song you don't want to hear any more, press track advance.  If you want to hear the beginning of the current track, press previous track.  Perhaps even have a habit of doing two keys each time:  Previous-track, then pause. 

This would seem to prevent your problem.

Brian.

[HamishNorton]

The technique proposed above by blgentry works, and I discovered another technique that also works. It appears that somewhere between the SX Virtual Link driver running on my Windows 11 PC, the DS 600 USB Hub and the Topping USB to AES EBU bridge, that some or all of the silence specified by "play silence at startup" is being dropped well before its specified time is up. My experience is that if 5 seconds (or more) of silence actually plays, the problem is fixed. So I tried setting the "play silence at startup" to 45 seconds (maximum available) and now it seems to work reliably with my system, although painfully slowly. The pause-only trick is good, but does require that I press pause before a playlist ends. At the moment I just pay a 45 second penalty for forgetting to pause a moment before the end. [PS - 20 seconds also seems to work, and is pretty practical]