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[mvilla]

i have just bought the latest release (as of 22 March) and installed today.
I got clicks and pops when listening and this happens with different file formats (wav, flac, aiff) and resolutions (44.1, 88.2, 96 kH).
I'm using AUDIOFIRE 4 as DAC, with latest firmware from ECHO.

As I'm a newbie here, just want to ask you if this is it the right place to post this kind of message ?

many thanks for your support
Massimo

[JimH]

I'm sorry for the problem.  You could try a different audio output mode.  The wiki has information on this.  You could also try adjusting the buffer size up or down.

Does it happen when the format of the audio changes?  Some DAC's have this problem.

Welcome to the forum.

[mvilla]

Thanks for your prompt answer !

You could try a different audio output mode

I went to Tool>Option>Audio Output.
.. As Output mode I can select only "Core Audio" (the other being Null Output)
.. As Output mode setting I selected my device, AudioFire4, and I tried to flag/unflag exclusive access or change the values of channel offset from 0 to 4 (from 5 on, values are not accepted)

Something else I can try here ?

You could also try adjusting the buffer size up or down.

I went to Tool>Option>Settings
.. As pre-buffering I tried all the values but unsuccessfully

Is there another buffer setting to look at ? it seems to me a buffer problem indeed.

Does it happen when the format of the audio changes?  Some DAC's have this problem.

No it is each time I press play

Please help 

[mvilla]

I tried JRiver for Windows in the same set-up and ... it works 
So hope it is just of matter of time for you to fix the OS X release !

Additional info for you, just in case:

In Option>Audio Output

Output mode: ASIO
Output mode settings:
.. Device: ASIO Echo FireWire
.. Channel :offset 0
.. Buffering: 0.5
.. Use large hardware buffer: flagged

In particular, in the OS X version, the last 2 parameters can not yet be set by the user.

Hope this helps,
Massimo

[Philthy]

Mine clicks and pops sometimes as well. Usually after I come back to playing a song after having it paused for a while. I see a lot of posts of people having the same issue, so I am guessing it is a bug that needs to be fixed. Restarting jriver app and pressing play will resume fine. Until it happens again randomly. Then restart it again. Maybe a memory bug or something that leaks into the audio output buffers.

[JHR]

Just loaded 156 (2012 Mac Mini i7 w/ latest OSX). Had prebuffering set to 10s from previous drivers. When I started up, there was regular and very noticeable clicking.

I set the buffer back to default (6s) and the app crashed. When restarted, the buffer was at 6s and no clicking (yet--through an hour so far, in the background too).

Maybe just touching the buffer controls after an install is doing something? I don't know, but it seemed to fix the issue.

[Philthy]

Moved from main thread:

Thinking out loud about my issues with songs eventually cutting in and out, popping, clicking after a random amount of time.

If I pause the song while it begins to go in and out, pop, crackle, etc, then play, it continues doing it.

If I press stop, then play, the song starts over, but it sounds fine. It will then play the next 2-15+ songs just fine until it might happen again. Stop, then play, all fine again.

How about between songs, you have the program stop+play, and continue on. There is something in pressing stop that is cleaning the buffers so that sound will play fine. Maybe an option because I'm not sure crossfade between tracks would work with something like this going on. Music selection are MP3, ALAC, m4p, FLAC and maybe some other formats. All ranging from 16/44 to 24/192.

MC 156
Mac Mini + V-Link USB S/PDIF adapter for optical output. Output is selected in MC to V-Link. The most it can pass on is a 24/96 signal, so I have anything above set to 96k, and anything below that I left as default.

There are no drivers for macs for v-link products they just work. I have played with buffer settings, load to memory, crossfade options, etc. No luck. Audio starts to pop lightly, then goes out and in. I have had it happen ONLY playing 16/44 songs. This does not happen with iTunes playing music.

[JimH]

Try resampling everything to 48Khz, just to test.  If that works, try 96Khz.  I had a receive once that introduced sound artifacts above a certain point.

[Philthy]

Will try some tests tonight. I did unplug the optical in the middle of the crackle, and plugged it back in and it continued with crackle.

iTunes with Pure Music never has this issue. (Unless something has changed)

I will pick 10 songs. Same songs will be used. Will reboot between sessions.

Play them in iTunes with Pure Music.
Play them in MC with everything set to 16/48khz.
Play them in MC with everything set to 24/96khz.

Report back with my findings.

[Philthy]

Locking the frequency seems to have fixed this issue for me. Pure Music looks like it runs locked as default, and played everything fine.  I tried locked with MC and they played through the playlist fine. I reverted it back to everything below stays unchanged, and anything above is resampled to 96000 and sure enough, about four songs in it started to warble, pop, then cut in and out.

I set everything to 24/96 and got through another 15 song set with zero sound issues.

Can't really say where the problem lies at this point, but I'm really happy this works. Thanks for the suggestion!

[JimH]

Good to hear.  The problem is on the device side.   It is not uncommon and not specific to one device or manufacturer.

[mvilla]

Good to hear.  The problem is on the device side.   It is not uncommon and not specific to one device or manufacturer.

I do not think so .... As I told in my post before, I tried JRiver for Windows in the same set-up (same device) and it works.
Also Itunes and other players have not this problem (both Mac and Windows). 
So hope it is just of matter of time for you to fix the OS X release !

Massimo

[Matt]

@Philthy
So is it correct that the problem only arise when playing tracks of varying sample rates?

@mvilla
Do you always get consistent clicks / pops, or is it sporadic (and maybe tied to machine CPU usage or something)?

[mvilla]

@mvilla
Do you always get consistent clicks / pops, or is it sporadic (and maybe tied to machine CPU usage or something)?

It is always present. It sounds like light "electricity", a noise that I do not have using JRiver in Windows or other players in Mac ...
Hope it helps.

[Matt]

It is always present. It sounds like light "electricity", a noise that I do not have using JRiver in Windows or other players in Mac ...
Hope it helps.

Could you send a log showing playback (use MC > Help > Logging) to logs at jriver dot com?  I'd like to see how the audio device's buffers are arranged.

Thanks.

[JimH]

Are you using 18.0.156?
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79413.0

[Philthy]

@Philthy
So is it correct that the problem only arise when playing tracks of varying sample rates?

I have all sorts of varying sample rates in my library. My issue of the weird noises typically begins around the middle of the 4th song, regardless of the rates. I've heard it happen when all the songs were standard 16/44. I cannot say if they were all the same format, though. I also have all different formats. m4a, alac, flac, mp3, etc.

If you would like me to test certain things, feel free. I already know my fix is to simply set my v-link to 24/96 for everything, but it is easy for me to change, I've got remote control apps everywhere.

[mvilla]

Could you send a log showing playback (use MC > Help > Logging) to logs at jriver dot com?  I'd like to see how the audio device's buffers are arranged.

Thanks.

Sure, will do it asap.
Massimo

[mvilla]

Are you using 18.0.156?
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79413.0

Yes, I do

[Matt]

Sure, will do it asap.
Massimo

Thanks.

The buffer arrangement is pretty simple, just six mono 32-bit buffers running at 96kHz.

Does it work any better if you resample to 44.1kHz in DSP Studio > Output Format?

Also, could you post your JRMark score from Help > Benchmark?

Thanks.

[mvilla]

Does it work any better if you resample to 44.1kHz in DSP Studio > Output Format?

Unfortunately not, it seems even worse.

Also, could you post your JRMark score from Help > Benchmark?

Here it is ! Can you tell me what does this benchmark mean ?

=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 4.675 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 3.112 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 2.438 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 1.692 seconds
Score: 1594

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 1.415 seconds
    Flood filling... 0.758 seconds
    Direct copying... 1.336 seconds
    Small renders... 1.638 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 1.887 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 1.012 seconds
Score: 2734

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 1.664 seconds
    Populate database... 2.035 seconds
    Save database... 0.201 seconds
    Reload database... 0.079 seconds
    Search database... 1.358 seconds
    Sort database... 1.146 seconds
    Group database... 0.943 seconds
Score: 2895

JRMark (version 18.0.156): 2408

[JimH]

In Option>Audio Output

Output mode: ASIO
Output mode settings:
.. Device: ASIO Echo FireWire
.. Channel :offset 0
.. Buffering: 0.5
.. Use large hardware buffer: flagged

Is the device called Echo Firewire?  It's the same in both tests, I assume, but the driver, if it's ASIO, isn't the same.

[mvilla]

Is the device called Echo Firewire?  It's the same in both tests, I assume, but the driver, if it's ASIO, isn't the same.

You are right.

The device is ECHO FireWire 4. It's the same in both tests,
ASIO is the driver used by JRiver in Windows while in OS X ML, in Option>Output mode I can only select "Core Audio" or "Null Output"
   
Massimo

[kiwi]

Just playing around, I set my output sampling rate to 44.1khz for 96khz FLAC and starting hearing clicks and pops all over the place. Almost as if it were stuttering.

I've attached the zip.  I'm running a mac mini with quad core, the benchmarks are something around 2900.

If I have it at the native rate, it doesn't click or pop.

On saving the changes to the DSP, MC crashed.

[ronfint]

I have also had terrible clicking --- bad enough so that you can barely hear the music over it. This is with two different macs, both with a firewire converter, Metric Halo ULN-8. The first several versions played well, but starting with around 18.0.150, Media Center became unusable for me. I now have 18.0.156.

Thanks for any advice that can be provided.

[InfernoSTi]

I had previously had the clicks/stutters/grunge but read about setting the output to match the best your DAC can handle. So per the above posting (thanks, Philthy!), I recently set all my output to match the highest level of my DAC and SPIDF converter (24/96) and now all files play smooth and I've not had any clicks no matter how long I played.  

Previously they would start to appear after an hour or less and get worse if I switch albums (I was regularly exiting between changes to reset).  I'm using an Eastern Electric DAC with a VLink II via USB from my 2009 Mac Mini (Build 156 on 10.6.8 ) if that helps.

John

[ronfint]

Just as a follow-up, is it possible that the current Media Center is having a problem with firewire dacs?

[Weedos123]

It could be but I'm not having any issues at the moment.

Mac mini (10.8.3) v156, firewire to Mytek DSD192, handles aiffs, flacs, dxfs and dffs without batting an eyelid.

[Matt]

I was just going to post saying we're having good luck with a Mytek connected by Firewire, when I saw Weedos123 say the same above.

Ironically iTunes plays distorted with the Mytek but fine with MC.

We don't have any other firewire interfaces around to test.

[ronfint]

Is there any way that I can obtain a usable copy of v.146 to test? I believe that everything was working well for me before v.150.

[ronfint]

Perhaps I should be more specific about the problems I am having with Media Center and my converter (MH ULN-8). I have downloaded v161, and  "clicking" is too mild a term to describe what is happening. I get very heavy static below which one can almost hear some music. On an older dac connected via usb, Media Center works. On the ULN-8, iTunes, Audirvana, and Pure Music work well, but not MediaCenter.

Is there a way to get help for this problem?

Thanks.

[Matt]

Perhaps I should be more specific about the problems I am having with Media Center and my converter (MH ULN-8). I have downloaded v161, and  "clicking" is too mild a term to describe what is happening. I get very heavy static below which one can almost hear some music. On an older dac connected via usb, Media Center works. On the ULN-8, iTunes, Audirvana, and Pure Music work well, but not MediaCenter.

Is there a way to get help for this problem?

Thanks.

I think there must be some specific hardware buffer configuration that's not working well yet.  Unfortunately we don't have a device that's exhibiting this problem.

Would you be willing to use Help > Logging to capture a log of playback when it sounds bad, then send it to logs at jriver dot com with a link to this thread?

Thanks.

[ronfint]

Thanks very much. I sent in a log.

[Matt]

@ronfint
Thanks for the log.  It looks like the device uses 20 mono buffers.  The only mono buffer device we have is two channel, so I can't do a perfect test.

I noticed you were playing at 192kHz.  Does using MC > DSP Studio > Output Format and picking 44.1 make any difference?

Are you targeting the first two channels of the device?

Is your CPU usage from Media Center high while playing?

Thanks again.

[ronfint]

Matt,

To answer your questions:

The behavior I am experiencing is independent of the sample rate. Static also occurs with 44.1 files. Changing the output format made no difference. I am targeting the first two channels of my converter.

I don't think that the CPU usage from Media Center is high --- it's around 7%.

I appreciate your help.

[Matt]

Testing of the new build appreciated:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79646.0

[ronfint]

I tried with both hi-res and redbook files, but no change.

The same is true with v163 which I just downloaded.

Thanks once more for your efforts to help.

[Matt]

Could anyone still experiencing this problem with 18.0.162 or newer, report the name of the device they're using?

Also, do you have a contact at the company that might be willing to work with us?  I think we may need to get one of the DACs people are having troubles with here in the office.

Thanks for any help.

[ronfint]

Matt,

I've sent this information in a personal message.

Ron

[Matt]

Thanks Ron.  I wrote an email to Metric Halo.  I'll try a call if I don't hear back in a few days.

[mvilla]

Could anyone still experiencing this problem with 18.0.162 or newer, report the name of the device they're using?

Also, do you have a contact at the company that might be willing to work with us?  I think we may need to get one of the DACs people are having troubles with here in the office.

Thanks for any help.

Hi Matt,

just tried with 10.8.164 and problem is the same: static noise from the speakers. I have not this problem if using the HDMI output but my DAC uses firewire interface. As mentioned in my initial post, my device is ECHO Audiofire4 and the company is based in Santa Barbara - California.
(http://echoaudio.com/products/audiofire-4).

Massimo

[Matt]

@Ron
I heard from Metric Halo.  I'll let you know what I learn.

@mvilla
I wrote to ECHO last year asking if they might like to cooperate with JRiver, but they never wrote back.  I used sales at echoaudio dot com and info at echoaudio dot com.  If anyone has a better address to try, I'd be happy to try again.

Thanks.

[Gone4it]

After reporting similar problems with static clicks/distortion, I vas told it was on the device side. I would be prepared to wait for the player to fall in place. But there is no indication that you expect the player to solve the problem.
On the other side I find it unacceptable not to emphasize on the problem, since it is so common.
The fact is that without improvement, the player is not acceptable regarding static noise.
Therefor I hope you will contact the manufacturer, and bring a statement.
I use MAC MINI OSX 10.8.3 just installed with SSD just for music. USB to SP.DIF. Converter the Diverter HR.
Otherwise a very nice product I hope to be able to enjoy all the way.
THANKS.

[mvilla]

@mvilla
I wrote to ECHO last year asking if they might like to cooperate with JRiver, but they never wrote back.  I used sales at echoaudio dot com and info at echoaudio dot com.  If anyone has a better address to try, I'd be happy to try again.

Hi Matt,
I can try, as their customer, to highlight the issue and ask for a specific email address for you if possible.
You may also refer to my mail and get in touch with them again. Does it make sense ?
Massimo

[Matt]

Just a note to say I'm getting good help from Metric Halo.

I don't know what the issue is yet, but I'm hopeful we'll work through it this week.

[Music_Man]

Good to hear that you're working with Metric Halo, Matt.  I too had a log-on instance with my Wavelength Crimson DAC last night, that resulted in continuous clicks.  It's too early for me to judge when, or should I say under what circumstances, the clicks are occuring however.  After I quite JRiver and restarted it, I had a fairly long click-free listening session.  However, if I see a pattern, when the clicks appear and/or when they don't, I will post accordingly. 

In the meantime, I trust the clicking issue will be resolved.  When it's believed that a fix has been discovered, or put in place, mentioning same in this thread would be appreciated.

Equipment:  Seagate 2tb Internal HD in an External Dock (with +27K tracks) connected via Firewire to a Mac mini, and then the Mac to a Wavelength Crimson DAC via USB

[Gone4it]

Just a note to say I'm getting good help from Metric Halo.

I don't know what the issue is yet, but I'm hopeful we'll work through it this week.

Regarding my resent post, I did contact Sonicweld, and got a very positive response. I was asked for a contact at JRiver. Since I have had some difficulty to respond to that, I feel that you Matt vill find Sonicweld very helpfull.
So hereby I ask you to contact Josh at Sonicweld, and I believe it can turn out to be working out for us all.
Thanks it is good to experience solid support even as far away as in Europe.

[Matt]

I believe this will be fixed next build.

Certain combinations of buffer arrangements and hardware buffer sizes could result in buffers getting filled one or two samples short.  The audible behavior of a not completely full buffer seems to vary by hardware.

Regardless, we'll fix the rounding issue and also switch to always filling an entire buffer (similar to what we do with ASIO and WASAPI on the Windows side) for the next build.

Thanks for all the help.

[Matt]

Testing appreciated:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79821.0

Thanks.

[mvilla]

Testing appreciated:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=79821.0

Thanks.

Hi Matt !
It works better now  You are on the right track !
for the first time, I did not hear any noise from the very beginning !
still some problem exists when you change from listening a high resolution file @96kH and switch to another file  @44.1 kH for example, while it seems not a problem to move from 44.1 to 96.
This my first feedback !

Massimo