INTERACT FORUM

More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 24 for Windows => Topic started by: BenProvost on October 19, 2018, 05:04:23 pm

Title: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: BenProvost on October 19, 2018, 05:04:23 pm
I really like JRiver for all the flexibility it offers and support for high fidelity files and hardware.

But there is one thing that drives me crazy: Any time I pause a song and leave it on pause for an extended amount of time (more than a few minutes), it somehow times-out and stops. Not only I lose the current location in the song, but the whole album resets to the first song. So I don't even know what song it was at. This is extremely frustrating when I get interrupted multiple times at work.

I searched in the options but cannot find any settings that seem related to that. Anyway, why would anybody want this as a default???

Also I could not find article on this issue. I previously had an older version of JRiver so I thought maybe it was just an issue with that version or that laptop. Now I have a new laptop (Windows 10 on 64 bits) and running the latest version of JRiver (24) and the issue is still there...

Am I doing something wrong?  Is this a known issue?

Thanks,
Ben
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: RoderickGI on October 19, 2018, 05:56:48 pm
There is a setting for Video to stop after a long pause (Options > Video > Advanced > Stop after long pause), but that shouldn't be affecting Audio.

Try turning that setting off anyway, and see if it fixes your issue. If so, MC needs a fix for that, so Audio isn't affected.
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: BenProvost on October 19, 2018, 07:12:10 pm
I tried that in version 23 and it did not help.
I just turned it off now in version 24 and I'll see if that helps.
But like you say, that should be for video only.
Is this behavior observed by everybody?
If so, I'm surprised that it is not flagged by more people.

Thanks,
Ben
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: RoderickGI on October 19, 2018, 08:25:07 pm
I just paused an Audio track for over ten minutes. It started again exactly where I left it.

I actually have the stop after long pause setting checked as well. So it isn't that.

Must be something in your environment/installation.

Hard drive going to sleep underneath MC while paused?
Network connection sleeping/lost/interrupted while paused?
DAC or audio card dropping the connection?

Could be anything. If you create a log of the issue happening, you might be able to find out what it is from that.

Are you just running MC24 standalone on the laptop?
No DLNA, network drives or devices, media server, NAS, etc. involved?
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: ~OHM~ on October 19, 2018, 11:59:43 pm
remember back a few months, I asked if pausing music was bad for the file....I can have my MC paused for 10 hrs or more with no issues on start up....just saying  ;)
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: BenProvost on November 17, 2018, 04:33:30 pm
Sorry for the delay in following up on this. I did not realize there were replies. I guess there is a setting I did not select to get emails when I get replies...  Thanks for the suggestions!

My setup is pretty basic. I use MC24 on my laptop with an external DAC on USB (AudioEngine through WASAPI).

I had the same issue with the previous version of MC and on a different laptop.
By "log", do you mean a log file generated by MC?
I looked around in the options and could not find any option to save a log file for debug.
Can you tell me how to do that?

Thanks,
Ben
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: RoderickGI on November 17, 2018, 05:23:27 pm
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Logging

Try to make the log time as short as possible, so the file sizes are smaller and it will be easier to find any issue. See if you can find a problem in the log file before asking for help looking.

Some things may not be logged by MC as they are a Windows issue. For example, if Windows is set to be allowed to power down your USB ports, that may be causing the problem. MC would just see the DAC suddenly disappearing in that case, which may not be logged, or may not be obvious in the log. See how you go.
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: BenProvost on December 06, 2018, 05:24:54 pm
Thanks for the explanations regarding logging.

I was in the process of enabling the logging and documenting each steps I was doing and observations, when I noticed something odd that I never noticed before: On the MC window header, where it displays the song title and progress, I could see that whenever I left the song on pause for a few seconds, it would change to "IPC" and the time progress would restart from 0, even though nothing was playing. Also whenever I would pause the song and restart it, even if I restarted it right away, it would always restart from zero. So it would not necessarily go back to the first song, but it would restart from 0 on the current song.

I started reading on IPC and eventually linked that to the WDM, which I use because my sound card is an external Audioengine DAC and headphone amp running through USB and using WASAPI.

So everything started fitting together: The reseting of song playback (pause restarting from 0, reseting to the first song, etc) is due to any other event on my laptop that steals the current process from the current song to another data stream, like a Windows sound reminder or whatever.

The solution was to create a zone and automatic switching. The recipe is clearly described in this JRiver help page:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WDM_Driver
"Problems With Streaming Video Using Media Center's Internal Browser and/or Erasing Playing Now".
Once I did that I had no issues with Pause.

The only thing I need to figure out now is that I think I need to create a zone for online music player. I listen to Pandora through JRiver so that it can pipe it through my external DAC. But at the moment that does not work with these new settings.

As a general comment, I think this whole IPC thing creates a lot of confusion. Isn't there a way to have this pre-configured so that it can do the switching between zones by default?

Anyway, I'm really glad that now I have it working!

Thanks,
Ben
Title: Re: JRiver stops when on pause for some time
Post by: RoderickGI on December 07, 2018, 06:21:45 am
Isn't there a way to have this pre-configured so that it can do the switching between zones by default?

Zoneswitch is that way to switch zones as required, based on rules. Not preconfigured, but quite functional, as you probably know after reading up on the WDM.

The WDM, the IPC reference, and related issues can be confusing and a bit messy. But at least MC has a solution to those issues.

Good that you got the original problem fixed.