Using JRiver to play FLAC files from a Synology NAS, I'm experiencing intermittent audible drop outs.
The drops are reflected in Ethernet Task Manager which shows no network activity during drop outs. (2 to 3 second pulses of data at several Mbps followed by several seconds zero data)
Playing the same music using VLC I never experience dropouts (a relatively consistent stream of data at around 800kbps for FLAC.), which suggests JRiver is the problem.
Of possible relevance is that I get the same drop out outs when streaming music from internet radio, which of course should have nothing to do with JRiver. (But only if JRiver and the Synology are both running)
Of further possible relevance is a Wireshark network trace which claims it is seeing frequent malformed packets when playing from NAS to JRiver ("malformed packet gsm over ip"). When playing from NAS using VLC I don't see the malformed packets.
The only relevant error in Windows logs is 4230 "TCP/IP has chosen to restrict the congestion window for several connections due to a network condition. This could be related to a problem in the TCP global or supplemental configuration and will cause degraded throughput." The discussions online for that error suggest upgrading to latest NIC driver (done) and resetting winsock & IP (done). Note I only see that error once after each reboot, but not again until the next reboot. PC is used only for playing music - nothing else.
Basically it all works fine if I use something other than JRiver but I like JRiver and don't want to change to something else.
System:
JRiver Media Center v19.0.128
Windows 8.1 Pro fully patched with all recommended and optional patches.
Antivirus: Windows Defender.
CPU: Intel i7-4770S 3.10 GHz
Memory: 16 GB
Synology DS214 SE