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[blgentry]

I've noticed for quite some time now that I get somewhat frequent sound drop outs with MC for OS X.  It's usually just a blip, but occasionally it lasts for a second or two.  This gets pretty annoying as I'm not used to media players doing this, especially on good hardware.  My Macbook Pro has a quad core i7 at 2.0 GHz, so it's fairly modern.

I can just about 100% trace these dropouts to activity of other programs on my Mac.  Firefox in particular, as it uses a LOT of memory the way I browse the internet.  Pretty much any time I'm having playback interruptions, I'll look at Activity Monitor and see that RAM is almost completely used up and that Firefox is using a ton of it.  Restarting Firefox fixes this for a time... though it's rather ironic that when I restart Firefox, I *can* get dropouts then too as it opens all the windows I had open previously!

If I had more RAM (I've got 8 GB) I probably wouldn't have this as often, unless I upped my web browsing (or other program activity) accordingly.

My question is, can I minimize this behavior with MC at all?  I've tried memory playback and it doesn't make a bit of difference in terms of the drop outs.  I've also tinkered with the software and hardware buffering, but (so far) I haven't noticed any difference there either.  I'm open to suggestion if there's more I should do there.  I'm wondering if I can set some sort of processor or memory affinity for MC?  Or perhaps some option I have yet to locate in MC?  This really does seem to be memory (RAM) related based on what I've experienced.

Of course I could just stop and start Firefox once (or twice or three times) a day.  Or use a browser more like a sane person.  But where's the fun in that??? 

Thanks for any suggestions.

Brian.

[Foxman50]

Hi blg

I am a complete noob to macs so forgive me if this is a well know optimisation. Only had one for two weeks

I was getting 1sec dropouts constantly after the mini had been playing for a couple of hours or so, couldn't work out why. Anyway i found a setting referred to  in the Audirvana user manual, page 38, basically it mentioned that the USB should be on its own hub.

I followed the instructions the other day, very simple, and so far i have not had one drop out. Hope I've not just jinxed myself.

[mwillems]

I've noticed for quite some time now that I get somewhat frequent sound drop outs with MC for OS X.  It's usually just a blip, but occasionally it lasts for a second or two.  This gets pretty annoying as I'm not used to media players doing this, especially on good hardware.  My Macbook Pro has a quad core i7 at 2.0 GHz, so it's fairly modern.

I can just about 100% trace these dropouts to activity of other programs on my Mac.  Firefox in particular, as it uses a LOT of memory the way I browse the internet.  Pretty much any time I'm having playback interruptions, I'll look at Activity Monitor and see that RAM is almost completely used up and that Firefox is using a ton of it.  Restarting Firefox fixes this for a time... though it's rather ironic that when I restart Firefox, I *can* get dropouts then too as it opens all the windows I had open previously!

If I had more RAM (I've got 8 GB) I probably wouldn't have this as often, unless I upped my web browsing (or other program activity) accordingly.

My question is, can I minimize this behavior with MC at all?  I've tried memory playback and it doesn't make a bit of difference in terms of the drop outs.  I've also tinkered with the software and hardware buffering, but (so far) I haven't noticed any difference there either.  I'm open to suggestion if there's more I should do there.  I'm wondering if I can set some sort of processor or memory affinity for MC?  Or perhaps some option I have yet to locate in MC?  This really does seem to be memory (RAM) related based on what I've experienced.

Of course I could just stop and start Firefox once (or twice or three times) a day.  Or use a browser more like a sane person.  But where's the fun in that??? 

Thanks for any suggestions.

Brian.

When you run out of RAM the computer begins using swap/virtual memory, which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM. If it happens to run out of swap, it will start killing processes.  No program will be well behaved in a RAM-starved environment, it's only a question of how badly behaved it will be. Having to use swap memory will slow everything down (even programs still in RAM) because trying to access the hard-drive as though it were RAM is processor intensive.  Have a look at your CPU load next time you see the problem, and I'm willing to bet you'll see periodic spikes there too.

Try increasing your buffer sizes to the maximum under audio options to see if you can "wait it out," but the real solution is not to over-commit your memory (i.e. close some tabs).

[blgentry]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Foxman:  I've done a lot of experiments with my USB configuration and I've got that nailed down.  This used to happen with the internal sound card too, so I'm pretty certain it's not a USB issue. 

mwilliems:  Thanks for the consideration.  However, I'm pretty sure I'm no where near swapping.  I'm pretty experienced with this kind of thing and normally when swapping occurs the entire system slows noticeably.  That's one thing that's odd about this:  The computer really doesn't slow down at ALL.  It's all full speed, I just get dropouts.  In terms of CPU, I'd expect high CPU to be an issue, but it really doesn't seem to be.  For example:

Right now I'm typing this in Firefox with several windows and tabs open.  I'm also listening to some music with Media Center (True Faith by New Order right this moment).  The crazy thing is, I'm also ripping a DVD as I'm doing all this, which has all 8 CPU cores showing between 99% and 100%.  Activity Monitor shows about 96% overall CPU utilization.  Yet the system is responsive and I've got no audio dropouts at all.  This is kind of what I'm used to with a Mac.  Except I haven't experienced a media player dropping audio before.  Hell, I can even play back a movie with VLC and get no sign of strain (just tried it).

I really do appreciate any help I can get on this.  I'm just saying what I've observed and tried.

Thanks,

Brian.

[blgentry]

I've done a bunch of experiments today.  I found by looking at Activity Monitor that almost every time I had a dropout, there was disk activity, specifically, disk *writes*.  I theorized that these were Firefox writing to it's cache every time I loaded a new web page.

So I moved firefox's cache to an external drive and ran with that for a while.  After an hour or so, I got a dropout or two.  So that's obviously not the entire problem.

Next I moved Firefox's cache back to the internal drive and moved my current playlist of 228 songs to the external drive.  This induced a LOT of I/O as it moved the files and I got a bunch of dropouts during the move.  After the move, it settled down and played well for a while.  Again, maybe an hour, or a little less.  Then I got some dropouts.  <sigh>

So I moved the files back to the internal drive.  This time I didn't get any dropouts during the move, which was kind of amazing actually.  I examined Firefox's cache and found it had a lot of entries, so I cleared it.  TONS of dropouts during the cache clear.  Seconds at a time in fact.  This must have hit the disk really hard.

For maybe 2 hours or so, maybe slightly longer, everything was smooth.  Then I got some dropouts again.  Note that during these tests I've always had at least a little bit of free RAM, sometimes a LOT of free RAM.  During some of the audio dropouts, I had more than a gigabyte of free RAM, so I'm now pretty sure this is not a RAM issue.

It also doesn't seem to be related to the transfer of files from disk since I got dropouts with the files on an external disk.

I've also characterized the reads and writes by process and found that most of the time, the big writes are in fact Firefox.  But other times it's system processes like launchd and mdworker.  I don't know what those processes do; I was just looking for clues to the pattern of reads and writes I saw in activity monitor.

I'm not really sure where to go from here.  I'm open to suggestions.

Brian.

[Matt]

What happens if you increase the buffering in Options > Audio > Device settings?

[blgentry]

I've moved three buffer related settings at different times:

Hardware buffering:  Changed from default to maximum power of 2.
Software:  Changed from 100 mS to 500 mS
Prebuffering:  changed from 6 S to 20 S.

None seem to have made a difference.  I'm not sure if there's a systematic way to try them.  I've tried prebuffer=20 with independent combinations of Hardware and Software settings.  If you've got a suggestion for how to combine these in various tests, I'm willing to try.

Brian.

[bMinor]

Hardware buffering:  Changed from default to maximum power of 2.
Software:  Changed from 100 mS to 500 mS
Prebuffering:  changed from 6 S to 20 S.

None seem to have made a difference. 

been there done that...
I've been getting the same occasional drop out since the 1st incarnation of mc20. It happens at least once a day and up to 1 sec. And that's with running nothing but MC on 8gb ram on macbook pro 7,1.
(unrelated: MC is also still crashing occasionally when doing a search in the top right search field. at least once a day.)

[Foxman50]

Yes i have been getting this on Mac latest version, only version I've tried so can't compare. Have tried all the buffer settings to no avail. Mac mini has clean install and is 2012 i7 16gb and SSD so resources are not an issue. I use MC as a UPNP client with minimserver running on a NAS.

[blgentry]

Well, I was hoping I was on to something and tried the following one at a time:

Disabled Firefox's disk cache completely.
Turned off video adapter switching in Energy Saver.
Moved my DAC to a dedicated USB2 port directly on the Macbook Pro.
Rebooted to "start from scratch".

I've been *living* in Activity Monitor for the past few days waiting for dropouts to happen.  I keep getting them more or less once an hour.  Just got two in a row in fact with over 1 GB of RAM free, CPU under 10%, and only some moderate blips on the disk activity meter.

If I had an SSD drive I would be tempted right now to move my OS and Applications over to it.  But I don't.    I'm not willing to spend more than $200 as an experiment either unfortunately.

I had the totally insane idea earlier today to completely reinstall OSX from scratch.  I'm *almost* willing, but it's a BIG project and would probably take 3 to 6 hours including restoring several hundred GB of data.  I'm not sure I feel that crazy just yet.

Brian.

[Foxman50]

Mine was fine then started dropping out, must have been 30 times over two minutes. Never been this bad. Nothing in activity monitor, but what i did notice is the small signal analyser window in MC was playing constantly even though the sound would drop out for a second each time. Not sure how i can prove what the fault is

[JimH]

Is a network involved?  Are the files local?

What happens once an hour?

[blgentry]

On my system JRiver MC is installed on a MBP with all of the media on the internal drive.  So, no network involved in playback.  Of course the computer itself is on a wifi network for internet access.  I have Media Network enabled, but only so I can use Gizmo from my Android from time to time (not very often at all).

I say "once an hour", but that's just an average.  It really is pretty random.  I could start keeping a log I suppose and see if I can pinpoint anything.

I'm open to any ideas for isolating this, short of "stop using everything else on your computer".  I love music, but I listen while I do other stuff, so having JRiver running alone isn't very useful for me personally.  But seriously, I'm open to testing and I want to find the problem. 

Brian.

[Awesome Donkey]

I'll see if I can reproduce this - I've not experienced this issue. What I'll try is loading a ton of tabs in Firefox while playing music to see what happens, if anything.

[glynor]

I've also never experienced this.

Simple step-by-step to reproduce (with numbered steps) would be useful. There's a lot of stuff in this thread.

[blgentry]

Step by step for me is:

1.  Use Mac normally.  This includes running Firefox pretty much 24/7 with several windows and tabs.
2.  Play music in JRiver MC.
3.  Wait for dropouts.  They will happen.

JRMark on my system is 2345.  I'm not sure where that rates, but this computer seems medium powerful.

Brian.

[Awesome Donkey]

Odd, I use it a good bit and I don't notice this at all but then again, I use Chrome way more than Firefox so for the sake of testing I'll use Firefox for the time being.

My JRMark is nearly double yours at 4341, but I'm not using an actual Mac but a Hackintosh.

EDIT: I forgot to ask, is OS X installed on a SSD or HDD?

[blgentry]

OSX, JRiver, and my media files are all on the internal Macbook Pro (500 GB 2.5") hard drive.  Not an SSD unfortunately.

I could switch to Chrome for a day or two if I thought that would fix the problem.  Forever in fact, even though I'm a super long time Firefox user.

Brian.

[glynor]

I use Firefox and basically never close it.

How many windows and tabs?

[blgentry]

I use Firefox and basically never close it.

How many windows and tabs?

I'm normally completely insane with something like 8 to 10 windows with 1 to 10 tabs each.  Recently I've dialed it way back.  What I have open now is typical for the past several weeks:  5 windows, one of which has 3 tabs; the others have one tab each.

Brian.

[glynor]

Are you secretly John Siracusa?

No, wait. He'd have had 30 windows open or some kind of nonsense like that.  Yeah, I use Firefox roughly like that, and don't see anything similar. Of course, none of my Macs have less than 16GB of RAM, and I have SSDs all around.

The SSD shouldn't make that much of a difference if you aren't swapping.  If you are swapping, well... That's terrible.

[JimH]

JRMark on my system is 2345.  I'm not sure where that rates, but this computer seems medium powerful.

That's fair to say.  Not bad, not great, but OK.

[JimH]

Did you try testing with Safari?

[blgentry]

@Glynor:  I shouldn't be swapping, as I don't notice massive slow downs that normally accompany swapping.  Also, watching Activity Monitor recently (and obsessively), I've noticed that with my reduced browser use, OSX is allocating a LOT of RAM to cache, which means the programs don't need it, so I can't be swapping in that particular condition. (of having lots of RAM cache)

@JimH:  I haven't testing using any browser than Firefox since noticing this problem.  I'm only focusing on firefox because it's my most heavily used application.  Plus I've seen a lot of disk writes from it (using iotop, an OSX profiling tool).  And of course firefox is consistently the largest user of RAM on my system.  If I were to use Chrome or Safari in the same way, I'd expect similar RAM usage.  But that's more than you asked.

Brian.

[Awesome Donkey]

I'd try Safari in this case as the alternate in this test - Chrome could potentially use more resources and make it worse.

A thought, which browser extensions do you use in Firefox?

[JimH]

We've seen browser problems before:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=91720.msg631293#msg631293

The extensions suggestion is a good one.

[glynor]

A few more questions, Brian...

(1) Do you have MC set to run full-time?  Does it seem to happen only when MC has been running a long while, and/or can you solve it immediately by quitting/relaunching MC?

(2) If the answer to #1 is yes, then when the issue is happening, go to Activity Monitor and pull up the info on Media Center 20.app. Switch to the Open Files and Ports "tab" of the info dialog.  Look through the list.  Do you see any media files listed in there that Media Center isn't actively using (playing or paused) which seem to be "stuck" there?  In particular, do you see the same file (or files) over and over and over?

(3) If the answer to #1 is yes, also report the stuff off of the Memory tab.  In particular, the Real Memory size.  Mine, for reference, has been running at least 24 hours.  The play state is currently stopped. I'm seeing:

Real Memory: 112.6MB
Virtual Memory: 3.85GB
Shared Memory: 41.9MB
Private Memory: 53.3MB

If yours is way out of whack with those kinds of numbers, we might be looking at a leak somewhere.  The #2 info could be illuminating.

[blgentry]

Regarding browser extensions in Firefox:  I really only use Text Link and Image Zoom.  I had 2 others installed that I never really use (NetVideo Hunter and BugMeNot), but I just uninstalled them and restarted Firefox as an additional testing point.  I've started keeping a lot of dropouts, so we'll see soon if this makes any difference or not.

Brian.

[JimH]

Testing with Safari would tell you a lot.

[blgentry]

(1) Do you have MC set to run full-time?  Does it seem to happen only when MC has been running a long while, and/or can you solve it immediately by quitting/relaunching MC?

I'm not using MC's startup options.  I start it and stop it when I want.  But that mostly means that it runs nearly 24/7, as I have little reason to quit the program.  That being said, I have now had TWO instances where MC was skipping/stuttering every 10 to 20 seconds; stopping and restarting the program in that case fixed the problem.  That's twice out of hundreds of listening sessions.

(2) If the answer to #1 is yes, then when the issue is happening, go to Activity Monitor and pull up the info on Media Center 20.app. Switch to the Open Files and Ports "tab" of the info dialog.  Look through the list.  Do you see any media files listed in there that Media Center isn't actively using (playing or paused) which seem to be "stuck" there?  In particular, do you see the same file (or files) over and over and over?

I'll look next time it happens.

(3) If the answer to #1 is yes, also report the stuff off of the Memory tab.  In particular, the Real Memory size.  Mine, for reference, has been running at least 24 hours.  The play state is currently stopped. I'm seeing:

Real Memory: 112.6MB
Virtual Memory: 3.85GB
Shared Memory: 41.9MB
Private Memory: 53.3MB

If yours is way out of whack with those kinds of numbers, we might be looking at a leak somewhere.  The #2 info could be illuminating.

Currently, with MC Paused, but running for around 18 hours or so I have:

Real Memory: 219.0MB
Virtual Memory: 8.0GB (Note this is the entire system Virtual Memory.  I don't have a column that's selectable for Virtual Memory per program)
Shared Memory: 30.3MB
Private Memory: 130.7MB

I'll post more results later.

Brian.

[glynor]

Virtual Memory: 8.0GB (Note this is the entire system Virtual Memory.  I don't have a column that's selectable for Virtual Memory per program)

Not columns in Activity Monitor.  Double click on the application itself to bring up the info on just that app.

[glynor]

You can check the Open Files thing even when it isn't happening, as long as it has been running a while.

[blgentry]

Just had another dropout.  Here's the memory stat:

real:  270.9 MB
Virtual:  3.89 GB
Shared:  28 MB
Private:  137.2 MB

I looked at the list of open files and only saw one media file, which was the one playing.  Lots of cache files, but I assume that's normal (maybe 12 or so?).

I've switched to Safari for the next round of testing.

Brian.

[Matt]

We're going to try putting a build out that modifies the thread priority.  Let us know if it helps once the build goes live.

[glynor]

Just had another dropout.  Here's the memory stat:

real:  270.9 MB
Virtual:  3.89 GB
Shared:  28 MB
Private:  137.2 MB

I looked at the list of open files and only saw one media file, which was the one playing.  Lots of cache files, but I assume that's normal (maybe 12 or so?).

That all seems to be in the realm of normal.

[blgentry]

We're going to try putting a build out that modifies the thread priority.  Let us know if it helps once the build goes live.

Bring it!  I'm ready. 

I've been keeping a log of dropouts, so I've got some pretty good data now.

Brian.

[Foxman50]

blgentry

When you get a drop out have you noticed if the music is still playing in the graphic equaliser window or does this stall also.

Just wondered if i have the same issue or it just appears the same.

[blgentry]

^ I don't really use the Analyzer window (inside of DSP Studio).  Maybe you mean the "dancing bars" display at the top of the window on either side of the song information?  I see that for sure.

But my dropouts are *very* brief.  The most they ever last is about 2 seconds and that's super long.  Usually it's just a small fraction of a second, which you can very easily hear, but unless you are staring at the display, you're not going to see a visual indication.

So, I guess my short answer is "I don't know because I've never been looking at it."

Brian.

[blgentry]

I now have about 24 hours of logs I've been keeping of dropouts.  Here's a sample:

----log-----
5/27  16:28  Pressed Play to resume
5/27  16:40  Dropout.  Was saving album art to several albums.  Dropout happened 10 seconds into that process.
5/27  17:09  Pressed Pause

5/27  17:21  Pressed Play to resume
5/27  17:46  Pressed Pause

5/27  18:34  Pressed Play to resume
5/27  18:36  Dropout.  Read and Write at the same time.  com.apple.Webki Writing and reading.  Then Webkit writing and Media Center reading.  Had just refreshed a page in Safari.  About 150MB RAM free, with over 1GB dedicated to disk cache.
---end log----

These last few were with Safari running instead of Firefox.  I can paste the whole log if anyone is really interested.

I'm switching to back Firefox now.

Brian.

[glynor]

I now have about 24 hours of logs I've been keeping of dropouts.  Here's a sample:

That sure makes it seem like it is disk limited, not RAM or anything else.  Where are the files stored?

[blgentry]

^ OS, JRiver MC, and all media files (with one exception) are on the internal 2.5" 500GB HDD.  Not SSD.  (Answered this once before, but I understand it's a big thread).

Brian.

[glynor]

(Answered this once before, but I understand it's a big thread).

Sorry.  Yeah.  I knew all the rest, but didn't know where the media files were stored.

Hmmmm... But increasing the Software buffer at Tools > Options > Audio > Audio Device > Device Settings didn't help?  Did you go all the way to 500ms?

EDIT: It seems you did.

[jayla]

Step by step for me is:

1.  Use Mac normally.  This includes running Firefox pretty much 24/7 with several windows and tabs.
2.  Play music in JRiver MC.
3.  Wait for dropouts.  They will happen.

JRMark on my system is 2345.  I'm not sure where that rates, but this computer seems medium powerful.

Brian.

Dear guys,

I have exactly the same problems. This comes up with the upgrade to Yosemite 10.9.x (I believe x = 5)


Best regards
Joachim

[blgentry]

Just installed 20.0.112 to test for audio dropouts.  Took me a few minutes to get my Custom Resources and Skins linked up, but that's now working properly.

Started playback and less than 1 minute later I got an audio dropout.  Darn.

I'm going to continue listening and keeping a log to see if it persists.

Brian.

[JimH]

Have you done a thorough search on things like OS problems?

[blgentry]

I've spent a good number of hours troubleshooting this problem.  I've tried giving more resources to the Media Center process using the Unix /OSX renice facility.  I've gone through guides from manufacturers of audio hardware and software to optimize for performance.  It's mostly pretty easy stuff like turning off Energy Saving settings and things like that.

My searches haven't turned up much that seems applicable to me so far.

I should mention that I frequently watch movies on this same computer and have never experienced an audio dropout that I can remember.  Video stuttering from time to time (like a dropped frame), but no audio loss.

Maybe I should do some more research.  However, you can see that two other people in this thread are reporting the same (or at least extremely similar) issue, so it wouldn't seem to be something super unique to my setup.

The other Mac users reporting this:  What hardware are you using?  Mine is:

2011 Macbook Pro 8,2
8 GB RAM
2.0 GHz Quad Core i7
500 GB internal hard drive

Thanks for the help so far from JRiver and others.

Brina.

[glynor]

Maybe I should do some more research.  However, you can see that two other people in this thread are reporting the same (or at least extremely similar) issue, so it wouldn't seem to be something super unique to my setup.

Yeah. Where there's smoke, there's probably fire.

I think the best hope is this:

We're going to try putting a build out that modifies the thread priority.  Let us know if it helps once the build goes live.

Hopefully it comes soon.

[JimH]

Yeah. Where there's smoke, there's probably fire.

The fire could be the OS.  The problem is odd.

[JimH]

I've spent a good number of hours troubleshooting this problem.  I've tried giving more resources to the Media Center process using the Unix /OSX renice facility.

If you're making changes at the OS level, please reverse them.

[glynor]

If you're making changes at the OS level, please reverse them.

I agree on this. Altering the system nice value is usually useless with complex applications, and sometimes causes trouble. It won't help, for sure, with Media Center, because it spawns a bunch of sub-processes that do almost all of the work, and your alteration will only apply to the "parent" process. This is true with most applications more complex than posix command line utilities.

There are exceptions here and there, but it won't be helpful here, and it can definitely cause other issues (perhaps even exacerbating this, because you're stealing resources for those sub-processes for the mostly-idle parent one).