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[mark_h]

We have a second PC running MC across a powerline plug with poor throughput.  If we stream there are sometimes hiccups during playback, so I thought "play from memory" might be the solution: well, once buffered, playback is flawless but there is always a 6-10 second gap while the next track is slurped across.  The solution would be to buffer the next track while the current one is playing.  This would allow seemless playback even over slow connection...

[bil1010105]

+1 for this. Most definitely.

[JimH]

We have a second PC running MC across a powerline plug with poor throughput.  

There are known problems when the adaptors are on two different legs of the electrical system (In the US, there are a neutral and two "hots").  I've seen drier outlet adaptors that claim to solve this.  I personally had an outlet that wouldn't work well, but moving it to the next room worked.  Yuo could try an extension cord to experiment.

Conversion on-the-fly would probably solve your music problem.

[Matt]

You might try increasing prebuffering in Options > Audio, and turning off playing from memory.

[mark_h]

One of my big regrets with this house is not having a wired network installed when we renovated 10 years ago.  Now it's mixture of wireless and powerline, which tends to work very well but some of the rooms at the extreme limits (such as the one with the 2nd MC user in) can have issues.

I've played around with various pre-buffering strategies but every now and then, regardless of what has been selected, there is a an issue with delays over the network causing stutters.

When does pre-buffering actually kick in, is it just as the current track is coming to an end? 

When I let tracks progress by themselves there is usually a good transition, but if I manually skip a track I always seem to get a "buffering" delay.  (pre)buffering the next track as soon as the current track starts playing would get around this (unless somebody is deliberately skipping tracks to break it).

It's not a huge issue, but it does impact how responsive MC feels sometimes...

[bil1010105]

I use MC at work, connecting to a music library (mixture of MP3 and FLAC) at home on my NAS, connected through WebDAV. In other words, over t'internet.

I've messed with a few options, but none of them really make much (if any) difference. To be honest, I kind of expect a bit of latency given the fact that I'm "streaming" over the 'net, but it's no less annoying all the same.

It would be really great if MC was smart enough to start buffering the next item on my playlist before the current item was finished. It would make a massive difference when listening to gapless albums for example (which I do a lot of).

[JimH]

It's not possible to fix a connection that is a little too slow, but you could force conversion to a lower bitrate.

[bil1010105]

I've never done that. Lesser you say?   

Surely it would take more time to convert and then buffer, rather than simply buffer? I understand you can't fix a slow connection... that's not what I'm suggesting. 

[Matt]

It would be really great if MC was smart enough to start buffering the next item on my playlist before the current item was finished. It would make a massive difference when listening to gapless albums for example (which I do a lot of).

That's exactly what prebuffering is.  Set it to a larger value in Options > Audio.

Jim's advice about converting (configured in Options > Media Network > Client Options is also good advice.