So I'm a big fan of the way JRiver prevents the computer from sleeping (or the monitor from turning off, or the screen saver from engaging) when playing music, but I've run into some trouble with the behavior lately. A few months ago I started using Gizmo, and I've also been having trouble getting my computer to sleep or engage the screensaver lately. I think the behavior is related.
Here are the testing steps I've done so far:
1) I tried setting the PC to sleep, turn off the monitor, or engage the screensaver after 1 minute so I could test different items, and see what was keeping it up. After going through powercfg and a few other things, it seemed to be linked to incoming LAN traffic. So I decided to investigate Gizmo, and here's what I found: if any mobile device in my house has an instance of gizmo running in the background (which most of my devices constantly do because android rarely seems to kill a process) the PC will not sleep, turn off the monitor, or engage the screen saver, even when nothing is playing. I made sure that no devices were actively using Gizmo (i.e. that they'd exited the interface so Gizmo should have been "hibernating"), but that made no difference.
2) Force stopping Gizmo on all devices (or taking all of the devices out of wi-fi range of the house) resulted in the computer almost instantly going to sleep/turning off the monitor/ or engaging the screensaver. It didn't seem to matter how long I waited; if a device had opened Gizmo at some point and remained within wifi range, it would keep the pc awake hours after the last interaction with Gizmo, or in the case of my wife's tablet (a galaxy note 10), more than a day since she'd last used Gizmo! Killing all Gizmo instances solved the issue completely (until someone opened gizmo again).
So the effect of this is that my main server HTPC doesn't have a working screen saver/sleep mode, and the only way I've found to solve it is to force stop Gizmo on several devices, which has a pretty low wife acceptance factor. Is there something in Gizmo's settings (or maybe in android device settings) that might help with this (some kind of "close out if idle" setting)? I like that Gizmo can wake the PC with a magic packet and keep it awake, I just don't know how to keep it from keeping the PC "up all night" and/or burning out my LED monitor. For now I just turn off my HTPC when I'm not in the room, but not having the server available isn't ideal.
Any advice would be appreciated as I'm relatively new to the Gizmo side of media network.