LMS 8.1.1 (and above) break radio streaming on SB Radio

[gordonb3]

> Slightly different from the one that was proposed earlier and that I
> added to my Gentoo build, but yes this works as well.
>
> Verified with 8.2.0 - not ready for 8.3.x yet.

You patched yourself? Would be great if you could confirm 8.3.1, as I
plan to release that probably soon.

[gordonb3]

LMS 8.1.1 (and above) break radio streaming on SB Radio

Edit: This title is in fact wrong. The problem exists with specific radio stations streaming AAC and manifests itself when you configure LMS to always pass native streams to the player.



Yesterday I upgraded my LMS from version 8.0.0 to 8.2.0, not noticing anything wrong. This morning the alarm on Radio did the tsjiboom thing and as I investigated I found that Radio refused to play the active media which happened to be a radio station (I did find out later that it still does play local media). Receiver and Touch were not affected, not sure about Boom as I initially neglected to identify that the issue was restricted to radio stations and the current track on the Boom was a local media file.

As LMS reported an issue with the Radio's firmware (with the version patch) I tried updating it with the community version but it wouldn't accept it and so I downgraded to 8.1.0 (there is no 8.0.1 install as mentioned in the forum post about the community firmware?) and I managed to get the community firmware on. It still states the following though:

You seem to be using a Radio with an outdated firmware, not recognizing this version of Logitech Media Server. Please consider patching it. Get more information.
 
...

Player Information

   Player Model: Squeezebox Radio
   Player Type: baby
   Firmware: 8.0.1-r16907
   Player IP Address:

Radio happily played the stream though and I went back to 8.2.0 only to find that it was broken again. So I stepped down again, this time to version 8.1.1 and it was still broken. So somewhere between commit effae84 and dd356a4 it went bust. My guess is that the issue may be related to one or more of the commits about transcoding somehow conflicting with the '--notranscoding' command line option.

[mherger]

What radio stream are you using? And are you saying you disabled transcoding? Then I'd recommend you re-enable it.

[gordonb3]

I tried two streams. They are both AAC I think. Either way that should not be the issue as they are processed quite fine by LMS up to 8.1.0

Obviously I have my reasons for disabling transcoding. Re-enabling it is not an option.

[Paul Webster]

Can you give a URL of one that fails for you?

[gordonb3]

Can you give a URL of one that fails for you?

Sure:

Kink Classics

NPO Radio 2


Edit: seems the AAC is dictated by the automatically generated URI for those stations. Unsure why it prefers AAC.

[philippe_44]

Why not using 8.3.0? There has been a lot of work to improve audio format management consistency

[gordonb3]

Same problem. No playback on radio streams. It was introduced between the two indicated commits and as apparently I'm the first one to discover the bug it was never solved.

[philippe_44]

Same problem. No playback on radio streams. It was introduced between the two indicated commits and as apparently I'm the first one to discover the bug it was never solved.

I did many of these commits because the mp4/aac management was a soup that was sometimes working by error. I will have look because it’s true that I did not pay much attention to no transcoding, but if fixing the issue means coming back to spaghetti code, I won’t do it, somebody else will have to

[gordonb3]

Okay. I guess at least it helps that I was able to pinpoint the problem to a fairly limited set of commits even though from my perspective I really need to restrict myself to the ones that are tagged as release. I've not done any deep investigation towards the actual cause but if I were to guess I'd say that something that used to be optional became compulsory and attempts to route the stream through a transcode binary that does in fact not exist on my system as I deliberately made these optional in the installer and did not select them for my personal target system.

[garym]

Sure:

Kink Classics

NPO Radio 2


Edit: seems the AAC is dictated by the automatically generated URI for those stations. Unsure why it prefers AAC.

I tried both of these through my own Radio (running latest community firmware, 8.0.1-r16907, and LMS 8.3.1 (see setup in Signature). First plays fine as 128kbps AAC. Second one plays fine as 64kbps AAC. All my filetype settings/transcoding, etc. are set as default (I've never changed them).

edit: please ignore my comment if you're using a special install/setup (e.g.,no transcoding) and my plain setup is not relevant for troubleshooting.

[gordonb3]

I tried both of these through my own Radio (running latest community firmware, 8.0.1-r16907, and LMS 8.3.1 (see setup in Signature). First plays fine as 128kbps AAC. Second one plays fine as 64kbps AAC. All my filetype settings/transcoding, etc. are set as default (I've never changed them).

edit: please ignore my comment if you're using a special install/setup (e.g.,no transcoding) and my plain setup is not relevant for troubleshooting.

I have a fairly special setup

Logitech Media Server Version: 8.1.0 - TRUNK @ UNKNOWN
Hostname: babaorum
Server IP Address: 10.19.17.1
Server HTTP Port Number: 9000
Operating system: Linux - EN - utf8
Platform Architecture: armv5tel-linux
Perl Version: 5.34.1 - armv5tel-linux-thread-multi
Audio::Scan: 1.06
IO::Socket::SSL: 2.072
Database Version: DBD::SQLite 1.70 (sqlite 3.36.0)

[philippe_44]

Okay. I guess at least it helps that I was able to pinpoint the problem to a fairly limited set of commits even though from my perspective I really need to restrict myself to the ones that are tagged as release. I've not done any deep investigation towards the actual cause but if I were to guess I'd say that something that used to be optional became compulsory and attempts to route the stream through a transcode binary that does in fact not exist on my system as I deliberately made these optional in the installer and did not select them for my personal target system.

It’s probably not a transcode binary routing but rather one of 1/ the format set for the player has been updated 2/ the internal mp4 to adts frame extraction that now allows any aac player to handle mp4 is not activated. It’s a complicated par of the streaming but I’ll look at that in the coming days. Just to be sure, can you confirm your player, os, cpu and if you could post a log with the conversion logging début set to info

[philippe_44]

Open file /usr/share/perl5/Slim/Player/Song.pm (might in a slightly different place) and change, around line 440

               # Set the correct format for WAV/AAC playback
                if ( exists $streamFormatMap{$format} ) {
                        $format = $streamFormatMap{$format};
                }

with

               # Set the correct format for WAV/AAC playback
                if ( exists $streamFormatMap{$format} ) {
                        $format = $streamFormatMap{$format};
                }

                $self->wantFormat('aac') if $format eq 'aac';

and you should be good to go

[gordonb3]

Interesting.

Since the number of changes were limited I did some tracing and found the offending change:

diff --git a/Slim/Player/Squeezebox.pm b/Slim/Player/Squeezebox.pm
index e3411fe0e94..786c5a8600e 100644
--- a/Slim/Player/Squeezebox.pm
+++ b/Slim/Player/Squeezebox.pm
@@ -705,12 +705,8 @@ sub stream_s {
 		
 		# container type and bitstream format: '1' (adif), '2' (adts), '3' (latm within loas), 
 		# '4' (rawpkts), '5' (mp4ff), '6' (latm within rawpkts)
-		#
-		# This is a hack that assumes:
-		# (1) If the original content-type of the track is MP4 or SLS then we are streaming an MP4 file (without any transcoding);
-		# (2) All other AAC streams will be adts.
-		
-		$pcmsamplesize   = Slim::Music::Info::contentType($track) =~ /^(?:mp4|sls)$/ ? '5' : '2';
+
+		$pcmsamplesize   =  $controller->song->wantFormat ne 'aac' ? '5' : '2';
 		$pcmsamplerate   = '?';
 		$pcmendian       = '?';
 		$pcmchannels     = '?';

Thanks for finding the correct method to fix this.