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[dconeill]

I'm running JRiver Media Center 31 on a Windows 11 machine. I've used several versions of MC over time without trouble. Lately, however, when I play an album MC stops after a few minutes - the MC display stays on, but I can no longer cause anything to play. A reboot lets me start MC again, but that's a suboptimal fix as MC just stops again.

I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling MC 31, no change; I've tried uninstalling MC 31 and installing MC 29, no change (29 used to work). I've been able to play entire albums using Microsoft Media Player, so the problem doesn't appear to be the data sources. I suppose I can try installing Media Monkey again and see what that does.

So I'm kind of at sea here - I've been poking around at this problem for a couple of weeks now with no apparent progress toward a fix. Can anybody offer suggestions on what I can check toward a solution?

[JimH]

It may be related to these problems:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,137521.0.html

Some users have zeroed in on the NVIDIA driver.  It's usually Windows 11 related.

Antivirus is always a possibility.

I'll merge your thread there.

HDMI?

A different physical connection might work.

[JimH]

A Google search might also turn up something.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/pc-audio-stops-working-when-pc-is-unattended-for/673b8632-2b38-412b-9918-0d21992b54a0

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000197391/troubleshooting-audio-problems-in-windows-11

[dconeill]

... [suggestions for investigation] ...

Thanks for the suggestions, I will have a look and will report back if I can make MC work again.

[esotericxa]

I have similar problems sending through a Rotel RSP1570 (HDMI 1.4a)  to a Panasonic Plasma FHD.
The only thing that does this is JRiver. PowerDVD works, my hardware Panasonic Bluray players s work, the Set top box works, and JRiver has been working for years,
Until the last 6 months or so, and it is getting worse. Perhaps JRiver is moving on to HDMI 2.0 and above and dropping support for 1.4a??
At first is was only when playing 4k 10bit material, (the plasma does 10bit) but now appears to apply to almost everything.
I have tried both Dell and Intel Motherboards, and several RX 550 cards and several DP to HDMI cables where there is no HDMI on the Video card.
Tried several ATI / AMD drivers. I am pretty sure there is a problem between the AMD HD Audio device and JRiver.
Some times when in the advanced sound panel in widows, the ROTEL device disappears, which I have never seen before, and perhaps points at the now 15 or more years old Rotel.
It takes a few seconds for PowerDVD to get the sound going, so perhaps it is negotiating the channel??
Occasionally the JRiver does actually work.
This is probably not a common problem, so may not be a priority. Running W10 Pro I5. Will need help if any one wants traces etc.
Upgrading the Rotel would be a drag since everything else appears to play fine to it..?? Both WASAPI and DIRECTSOUND lockup after a few seconds of jerky video.
Suggestions welcome of course. Thanks

[dconeill]

I wanted to report back on progress so far.

Summary:
emptying the MC library completely, then rebuilding it from scratch, seems to have stopped the problem. I have no clue what caused the problem or why this action seems to have fixed it, but after about a day I'm still able to play music for an unlimited amount of time without MC halting.


I looked into JimH's suggestions, but nothing came of them as far as I could tell. Among other things, I don't have any NVIDIA hardware or software that I can find, so that issue doesn't seem to have been the cause.

I was unable to duplicate the problem with Windows Media Player (win11 pro) or the free version of Media Monkey. Both played for as long as I let them without interruption.

I tried uninstalling, then reinstalling MC. Same behavior.

I tried disconnecting, then reconnecting, the USB drives on which I keep my audio files. No change observed.

I rebooted a couple of times. No joy.

Then, by accident, something seems to have worked. I was maintaining my music files, cleared the existing MC library, and created a new sandbox library with just a few dozen files, including some of the files that had stopped abruptly before. Suddenly the fault I had been seeing before stopped happening. So I cleared the library completely and rebuilt it using all my recorded music files. Now, so far, after about a day, I haven't seen the player halt again.

This is a little frustrating because I can't induce the problem again, so I don't know what the cause is. But at least so far, I can listen to music again.

So, to esotericxa, try clearing and rebuilding your music library from zero. Maybe that will work for you.

I'll report back again in a few days to say whether I'm still able to play music files at will.

Thanks for everyone's help.

[esotericxa]

Will give it a go, Thanks, and thanks for the heads up

[esotericxa]

Found a fix for me that is working for today (been here before I think)
Cleared the library as per dconeill suggestion above.
Did not work for me, so...
I ran the AMD cleanup utility to remove all the AMD video and sound stuff.
Let windows update install an old AMD driver, it picked one from 2022 that has no adrenaline control system

Driver Date 2/08/22 (in Australia that would be 2nd August, and different in the USA...)
Driver Version 31.0.12020.1
I have added an attachment, that shows where to get this driver. May only work on Dell Rx550 which mine are. Not sure how to install manually, mine came from Windows Update

whatever the version means.

AMD High Definition Audio Device was missing.
Checked optional updates, and there was an AMD audio package of some sort.
Installed that and suddenly we now have an AMD High Definition Audio Device.

HDR Videos now working perfectly.
(have not reloaded the library yet)
After tuning all the Digital TV channels again, that is now working perfectly as well.
Hope this helps
So, to sum up, it may be that more recent AMD software is at least part of the problem.

[dconeill]

Another update from me: my original problem is back, so whatever I did before didn't work.

I have more information now, and I've started down the path laid out in the Troubleshooting guide. I didn't know about the Troubleshooting Guide earlier. (More about that in a moment.)

The Troubleshooting Guide is available at https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Guide.


To JimH and other MC helpful persons:
Now about the Troubleshooting Guide. As I said, I didn't know about it before, but I do now. I suggest to the MC staff that you tell users about the existence of this resource as follows.
When MC threw its error message in my case, it presented dialog boxes offering suggestions.
The last of them contained the text

     If you continue to experience problems ...
     1) Backup your library ...
     2) Uninstall Media Center ...
     ...
     5) Restore your library ...

My suggestion is that you add a line to this and similar error dialog boxes along the lines of

     Additionally, please see the MC Troubleshooting Guide at https://wiki.jriver.com
     /index.php/Troubleshooting_Guide

I think such a notice would have helped me become aware of the Troubleshooting Guide earlier.

[curleyfrei]

Hello, all -- I've been having this problem for the last few months.

Playback will randomly pause, and will not resume unless I stop the track and start over, forcing me to seek to wherever it got stuck. Sometimes, the media player freezes up entirely and crashes; then tells me that the database is in read-only mode when I launch it again.

I'm on a PC with NVIDIA GPU. My drivers are up to date. I'm using a 3rd party driver for the DAC in my headphone setup, but I don't have this problem in any other apps using audio; also, it still happens if I switch over to my speakers, which uses the built-in "High Definition Audio Device" driver. I have no problems with audio except when using JRiver.

I haven't bothered rebuilding the library from scratch yet, since dconeill reported that the problem returned after they did so.

Do we have ANY fix for this yet? I'm using v31, and it's been fine since purchasing it last year. The problem is only in the last few months. Should I just try rolling back to version 30?

[JimH]

Driver? 

Take a look at this thread for ideas:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,24031.350.html

[curleyfrei]

Driver? 

Take a look at this thread for ideas:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,24031.350.html

I forgot to mention I did look at that thread. I don't have AMD and my music is on my internal 7200rpm HDD. It's plenty fast so I don't see why that would suddenly matter.

[JimH]

AMD isn't the only one with driver problems.  Look at the other pauses in that thread.

Something seems to have changed.  Could even be a Windows update.

[curleyfrei]

The other threads about pauses I see there are:

• "Dropped Frames (pauses) with Video"

I don't use JRiver for video.

• "Arcam renderer pauses at end of track"

I'm not using any Arcam anything.

• "Pauses in Video"

See above.

• "Playback Pauses
  A new drive solved it"

My drive is fast and healthy.

And I'm not about to reinstall my entire OS just to see if that gets rid of this. I'm really hoping this is addressed in the next update.

[JimH]

The problems may be different, but the solutions may be relevant.

[dconeill]

UPDATE - 2024 07 08. Problem returned. See my next post in this thread, glimmers of a little hope might be appearing. End of update.

In my previous thread on this topic ("JRiver Media Center 31 stops playing") I reported that JRiver Media Center (MC) would stop playing after a few minutes and then require extraordinary measures to get it to play again, only to have it stop again after a few minutes. The message "buffering ..." would appear at the op middle of the MC UI.

To cut to the chase, the problem was that the USB devices were going to sleep. Apparently (this is a guess) MC doesn't send information to the Windows operating system that it's using the external hard drive, and after a short amount of time the OS puts the external storage to sleep to save power. The USB device would go to sleep and not wake up unless you at least stopped and restarted MC.

The solution, at least at a gross level, appears to be to use Windows' "Device Manager" to turn off the power-saving feature of the USB controllers. See:
https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/682-how-to-prevent-windows-11-from-turning-off-usb-ports-when-asleep
This is a little coarse at the moment, since it turns off power-saving for all USB storage devices. I'm still working with it to see if I can turn off power-saving for a single USB storage device.

Since I made this change I haven't had a single instance of my old bugaboo buffering issue.

[dconeill]

Nope, didn't work. Like many other attempted fixes, it appeared to work for awhile, but then the problem returned.

BUT

I finally, after months of searching, found something germane in the JRiver troubleshooting info. It was bloody hard to dig it out, and I stumbled on it more or less by accident. I'm working with it now to see if it will be fruitful.

See the URL https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Network_and_Slow_Storage.

This didn't have any of the keywords I was looking for (mainly "buffering"), but it appears to address the issue. We'll see. At the moment I don't think highly of JRiver's troubleshooting indexing.

What I've done so far:
As a test I put a few of the problem albums/media files onto my system disk. The problem disappeared for a few days now.

As another test I put my media SSD onto a USB port that's directly on my computer. Previously I had it on a docking extension box USB port. So far, so good with this.  After I've used it for awhile I'll report back.