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[anton-sa]

Hi All
Im new to jriver, How i came to use jriver is that i am a keen kodi/xbmc user, however i was looking for something that can parse sacd iso's,
enter jriver linux. Oh im in the i.t industry and a linux fanatic, so dont want to run windows products. I bought and paid for jriver linux 21.

Im having the problem that when i play sacd iso's the 2ch (resampled to 192khz by way of dsp studio option in jriver) it plays perfectly,
when i switch to multi-channel album, the audio lags. during this time, i can see the cpu usage on all 4 cores well over 50%.
in 2ch mode its around 30% per core.. and no audio stutter.

Im running intel nuc5i5ryh, which is a i5 processor with upto 2.7ghz, i have 120gb kingston ssd @ over 500megabyte/second transfer rate.
I have gigabit lan, and 8gb of 1866mhz memory.

i tried copying the content to the ssd and playing it like that, no difference, so i can conclude its not the streaming causing the issue.

I played around with the BITSTREAMING option, switched it from NONE to HDMI. also no difference.

the output device via hdmi, is a rotel rsp-1572 av processor.

Linux distro wise:
ive tried
lubuntu 15.04
debian 8.1 (with and without pulseaudio)

any advice? im so keen to get my solution finalised.

Regards,
Anton

[Hendrik]

multi-channel SACD is very computationally expensive to play, without having looked into the performance details of that NUC in particular, its quite possible that its beyond its capabilities of flawless playback.

[anton-sa]

hi there
ok cpu usage (checked again) is between 150% and 215% (accross 4 cores, so +-53% max per core)

processor fitted to the nuc5i5ryh is : intel i5-5250u

desperate for a solution, i cannot imagine an i7 is needed?

[mwillems]

You should post the JRMark of your machine (found under help-->benchmark), that might help us get a sense of what the bottleneck is.  Multi-channel DSD is very processor intensive.

One step that might help: on the top bar, there's an audio visualizer that runs while music is playing.  Try right-clicking on it and disabling it.  For some reason on the Linux version of MC it uses a surprising amount of CPU (a few percent), and if your computer is close to fast enough, removing that additional load might help.

Additionally, have you tried changing your CPU scaling governors?  Try performance instead of powersave (for example) and see if that helps.

[anton-sa]

math score 1380
jrmark 2079

[mwillems]

math score 1380
jrmark 2079

That's on the low side for multi-channel DSD.  The recommendation around here is a JRMark of 2000 for stereo DSD, and more is needed for multi-channel (around 3k).  I don't have any DSD files to test with, but if you search the forums you'll see other folks with specs similar to yours having difficulty with DSD.

Some folks suggest doing the conversion of the file offline first and then playing back the converted file as on the fly conversion is what causes the load.  Here's a thread with advice: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=91616.0

FWIW, you probably don't need an i7; a modern desktop i5 procesor (not a NUC) could probably handle it.  The NUCs use laptop processors, which are lower powered.

[JimH]

math score 1380
jrmark 2079

It's a little low.  OK, not great.  Fine for ordinary audio and video.

[anton-sa]

aha. one of my desktops. an i7 2600k. scores +-2800 on the math score.
 

[anton-sa]

my lenovo laptop. thinkpad t530. with i7 Q.... quadcore.. scores 2339 with math and 2760 with jrmark

If only the recommended specs were on the forum or website somewhere easier to find... i would have bought the i7 nuc.
now i sit with a $500-$600 machine thats not quick enough.. i could have shelled out an extra $100 for the i7 version..

kodi plays a high bitrate 1080p movie with dts master audio 96khz multitrack soundtrack. and doesnt go about 15% cpu per core...

[Hendrik]

As odd as it sounds, SACD Multi-channel is more expensive to play than a 1080p movie. Thats just how it is.

Recommended specs are a very hard thing to post anywhere, as it greatly varies depending on what people want to do. Not everyone wants to play Multi-channel SACD, and if you exclude that (and maybe DSD in general), an audio only device can get away with much much lower performance requirements.

[anton-sa]

yeah i hear you.
i see a new bios has JUST been released for the NUC in question. i will install and see... and will post back.
i can surely keep benchmarking and see if score improves..etc I cannot imagine a quadcore 1.6ghz (turbo upto 2.7ghz x 4) to not be enough...

the nuc5i5ryh is fairly new, i got the nuc(s) last week, there was a bios update for end of july. to date there have been 8 bios updates.
considering the device only came out jan/feb/march this year./ thats alot. perhaps more performance will unlock.. we will see. i will update here

[mwillems]

yeah i hear you.
i see a new bios has JUST been released for the NUC in question. i will install and see... and will post back.
i can surely keep benchmarking and see if score improves..etc I cannot imagine a quadcore 1.6ghz (turbo upto 2.7ghz x 4) to not be enough...

the nuc5i5ryh is fairly new, i got the nuc(s) last week, there was a bios update for end of july. to date there have been 8 bios updates.
considering the device only came out jan/feb/march this year./ thats alot. perhaps more performance will unlock.. we will see. i will update here

Also please try the two performance tuning tips I offered above; fixing your scaling and disabling the visualizer may give you enough extra "oomph" to put you over.

[anton-sa]

Ok folks. an update.

using fedora core 22, my "math" score went upto 1420.. up from 1730 on other distro. but its such a small increase.

BAM! multichannel audio works perfectly now. cpu usage is mostly around 10 - 15% per core., but peaks at around 180% (45% per core +-)

to be honest i think pulseaudio has something to do with it, the other nuc.. identical setup, (my fedora unit) has pulseaudio removed, and only alsa.
i use this box for kodi, and kodi wont "see" my rotel hdmi device/processor with alsa.

I'll play around a bit and post more info here as i can.. but im very chuffed that its now working smoothly... and i even browsed some web pages while listening to music
system seems responsive also...

[mwillems]

Ok folks. an update.

using fedora core 22, my "math" score went upto 1420.. up from 1730 on other distro. but its such a small increase.

BAM! multichannel audio works perfectly now. cpu usage is mostly around 10 - 15% per core., but peaks at around 180% (45% per core +-)

to be honest i think pulseaudio has something to do with it, the other nuc.. identical setup, (my fedora unit) has pulseaudio removed, and only alsa.
i use this box for kodi, and kodi wont "see" my rotel hdmi device/processor with alsa.

I'll play around a bit and post more info here as i can.. but im very chuffed that its now working smoothly... and i even browsed some web pages while listening to music
system seems responsive also...

I can't tell if adding or removing pulse was what helped?  If you're using pulse it resamples all audio to 48KHz by default so if removing pulse helped, that may be why.  If it's better with pulse, I'd be suspicious that you're actually getting the specified sample rate. 

That said, JRiver uses alsa by default, so unless you selected the "pulse" output device it shouldn't really matter for JRiver?  Very mysterious.

[anton-sa]

heres whats interesting, firstly, my rotel rsp1572 processor detects the sample rate, so previously it was indeed at 192khz.

I dont really know what the point of pulseaudio is expect maybe for production purposes, but all over the internet theres howto's of people removing pulse
in flavour of alsa for playback...

cpu usage is easily down 10-15% per core.

my other nuc (identical) has debian 8.1, i'll test. this will bother me till i find out why.. haha

oh yeah,. fedora 22 ships with linux 4.x kernel. ? perhaps this has something to do with it..

[anton-sa]

oh yeah. previously alsa was selected. but pulse was still running....

im thinking perhaps the newer kernel does better with the newer broadwell platform...

oh and i was able to import all my albums and artwork WHILE listening to multi channel without it skipping a beat.

[Awesome Donkey]

I wouldn't attempt using PulseAudio actually - I've read reports the output is stuck at 48kHz so it might be possible the high CPU usage is from it trying to convert the multi-channel DSD to PCM on-the-fly. ALSA is bit-perfect, so honestly there's probably no reason to change this.

oh yeah,. fedora 22 ships with linux 4.x kernel. ? perhaps this has something to do with it..

Possible, from what I've read newer kernels/ALSA are supposed to have better support for DSD.

[mwillems]

Possible, from what I've read newer kernels/ALSA are supposed to have better support for DSD.

That's probably part of the story.  I think prior to 3.19 Linux had no native DSD playback ability, so conversion was mandatory prior to that kernel.  Regardless, good news.

[bob]

That's probably part of the story.  I think prior to 3.19 Linux had no native DSD playback ability, so conversion was mandatory prior to that kernel.  Regardless, good news.

IIRC there was supposed to be a separate format setting for DSD (like S32_LE, S16_LE, etc).
We aren't supporting that yet. With the auto setting S32_LE will be tried first.