Drops in sound when playing Apple Lossless

[Bimmerstyle]

Hi, I'm new to this forum and the Squeezebox family in general. I've been running LMS and some Squeezeboxes for about a week now. First I had LMS installed on my Synology DS216se but performance was lagging. Large playlist were impossible to play and the system was slow in general.

So I installed LMS on an old laptop I had laying around. An HP elitebook 8460p. It has an i5-2520M with 4GB of ram and a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive. Plenty of power so I thought.

Browsing in general is faster then it was with the NAS and loading large playlists isn't a problem anymore.

I do however still have problems with playing Apple Lossless. Most of my collection is in high bitrate MP3 but I do have a number of albums in ALAC. When I try to play any of these songs I get constant drops in music. I tried disabling converting to FLAC so it would convert to PCM but with the same result. Stil got a drop about every 10 seconds. The drop usualy also lasts about 10 seconds. So listening to this music is basicly impossible.

I tried changing some stuff in the performance tab in advanced settings on LMS.

Memory is set to high since the laptop has 4GB
Serverpriority is set to -16 High since the laptop is only used as server, nothing else
Scannerpriority is also set to -16 High
Playlist length is set to 2500

Nothing changed. Dropouts are still present.

When I looked at the performance of the laptop I noticed that the processor almost never exeeds 10% when playing those Apple Lossless files. Memory sits at 50% and there is barely any hard-drive activity. So it seems LMS isn't using any of the power the laptop has for transcoding these files. Are there some other setting I can change for transcoding ALAC to FLAC or PCM. The laptop should be able to do this with ease.

My setup is:
Server: HP Elitebook 8460p thru ethernet
2x Squeezebox Classic on Wifi
Minix Android box with SqueezePlayer on wifi
PC with Squeezelite-x thru ethernet

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom.

[Paul Webster]

Do you get the same drops on your "PC with Squeezelite-x thru ethernet"?

[Bimmerstyle]

Yes I get them on all devices.

I should add that when LMS was installed on my Synology NAS I had drops as well when playing ALAC. But then the drops only happened on the Squeezebox that was furthest away from my router. Probably because of the poor wifi connection it has. All the others kept on playing back then.

Now, on the laptop it happens on all devices. It seems the NAS did a better job of transcoding these files with its single core Marvel processor than the laptop does with its I5. This makes no sense to me at all...?

[Bimmerstyle]

Hmmm... I just converted one of the affected albums to FLAC and reloaded the library. When playing these FLAC songs the problem persists. So it's not a transcoding issue after all. It seems like it has to do with bandwith.

This still is strange because like I said, the PC is on ethernet, just as the server is and one of my Squeezeboxes is right next to the wifi router and has 100% signal strength. Both of them should at least keep on playing...

[d6jg]

Is the server on Windows? If so look at the firewall and any AV that’s running and switch off temporarily.

Also try pointing LMS at a shared drive on the NAS and playing same files from there - different disks

[Bimmerstyle]

The server is on Windows 10. It has no additional AV except what is build in to Windows 10.

I tried disabling both Firewall and Windows AV on the server but the problem persists. I will try pointing LMS to the NAS later today. I will keep you informed.

[Bimmerstyle]

So I moved one of the affected albums to a test folder on my NAS. It didn't help however. Dropouts are still present like before. I rebooted the laptop and started LMS as administrator but this also didn't change anything.

Some observations though:

-Copying of this album to the NAS with file explorer went fine. It wasn't lightning fast but as to be expected from a mechanical drive to another one. In a matter of seconds the album was copied over.
-When rescanning my LMS library and adding the newly pointed folder I noticed however this proces was very slow. It took over half an hour for just rescanning (not adding) my library and adding just one album. On my NAS this proces took only 2 or 3 minutes tops.

So it seems LMS is somehow hampered in reading the hard drive, any hard drive for that matter since results with the folder I placed on the NAS are similar. Other than that the laptop works fine. As I said it's not lightning fast but reasonably fast for a laptop with a spinning drive. It has a fresh install of Windows 10 so there isn't much running in the background. Everything else I do on it is reasonably snappy. It seems only LMS has performance issues, and only when it comes to reading large amounts of data. Navigating the settings menu and adjusting things in it works perfectly. Also, loading a large playlist (2000 songs) goes almost instantly. This took forever on the NAS, sometimes freezing the entire NAS...

Would re-installing LMS be a sollution? If so, would there be benefits in upgrading to a more recent version of LMS. I'm currently running the official Logitech version 7.7.6.

[Bimmerstyle]

Ok, I think I've pinpointed the problem. Bad news is I probably can't do a whole lot about it...

So I ended up installing LMS v.7.9.1 found here on the forum. At first I was hopefull. Rebuilding my library was a lot faster than before. In about 15 minutes it was done. When playing one of the affected albums on my PC everything went fine. No drops in sound during 2 songs. After that I powered up the other clients and this is when problems started again. The one in the living room (the Squeezebox with 100% signal strength) didn't affect it. Songs kept on playing. After powering up the Minix in the bathroom and the Squeezebox in the hobby room (the one furthest away) the sound drops reappeared however. Powering those back off solved the problem again.

It seems those are too far away from the wifi router and can't keep up with the larger file sizes. What I think is happening is that they need to buffer again and the ones with good signal try to sync with the bad ones causing dropouts on the entire system.

Knowing this I can do a workaround. The Lossless files are really not necessary when playing background music around my house. So my plan is to convert those to MP3's and use them in the playlists for general background music during the day. I keep the lossless albums and rename them to something like "Albums Name [Lossless]". Then, when I want to sit back in my living room enjoying some music, I can still play those albums since the Squeezebox in the living room has no problem playing them.

In the past I messed around with Wifi repeaters but I never found these very reliable and since I rent this house I really can't go pulling wires to the bad signal rooms even if I wanted to so I think this workaround will have to do (unless someone knows a better way to solve this...). At least the scanning of my library is back at it's normal speed now. That's something.

Thanks to the people who helped me figuring it out.

[slartibartfast]

Ok, I think I've pinpointed the problem. Bad news is I probably can't do a whole lot about it...

So I ended up installing LMS v.7.9.1 found here on the forum. At first I was hopefull. Rebuilding my library was a lot faster than before. In about 15 minutes it was done. When playing one of the affected albums on my PC everything went fine. No drops in sound during 2 songs. After that I powered up the other clients and this is when problems started again. The one in the living room (the Squeezebox with 100% signal strength) didn't affect it. Songs kept on playing. After powering up the Minix in the bathroom and the Squeezebox in the hobby room (the one furthest away) the sound drops reappeared however. Powering those back off solved the problem again.

It seems those are too far away from the wifi router and can't keep up with the larger file sizes. What I think is happening is that they need to buffer again and the ones with good signal try to sync with the bad ones causing dropouts on the entire system.

Knowing this I can do a workaround. The Lossless files are really not necessary when playing background music around my house. So my plan is to convert those to MP3's and use them in the playlists for general background music during the day. I keep the lossless albums and rename them to something like "Albums Name [Lossless]". Then, when I want to sit back in my living room enjoying some music, I can still play those albums since the Squeezebox in the living room has no problem playing them.

In the past I messed around with Wifi repeaters but I never found these very reliable and since I rent this house I really can't go pulling wires to the bad signal rooms even if I wanted to so I think this workaround will have to do (unless someone knows a better way to solve this...). At least the scanning of my library is back at it's normal speed now. That's something.

Thanks to the people who helped me figuring it out.

Are all your squeezeboxes synchronised?

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[Bimmerstyle]

Yes, they are all in sync.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-G950F met Tapatalk

[slartibartfast]

Yes, they are all in sync.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-G950F met Tapatalk

I don't think you mentioned that in the original post.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[Bimmerstyle]

No, I guess I didn't. At the moment I didn't think it was relevant since I assumed it was a transcoding issue.

Now, while I'm writing this I've been listening to a Chris Rea album in Apple Lossless for about half an hour on all 4 devices simultaneously and I didn't have any dropouts so far. I downloaded Wifi-Analyzer on my phone and at the moment I'm the only one in the neighbourhood using wifi channel 7. Perhaps when I got the dropouts someone in the neighbourhood was using channel 7 as well hampering my wifi connection..? I'm gonna keep an eye on it but for now everything works as it should. Fingers crossed...

[garym]

No, I guess I didn't. At the moment I didn't think it was relevant since I assumed it was a transcoding issue.

Now, while I'm writing this I've been listening to a Chris Rea album in Apple Lossless for about half an hour on all 4 devices simultaneously and I didn't have any dropouts so far. I downloaded Wifi-Analyzer on my phone and at the moment I'm the only one in the neighbourhood using wifi channel 7. Perhaps when I got the dropouts someone in the neighbourhood was using channel 7 as well hampering my wifi connection..? I'm gonna keep an eye on it but for now everything works as it should. Fingers crossed...

You might consider setting your router to use a different channel than most of your nearby neighbors. Also, channels 1, 6, or 11 will be best, as they are the only 2.4gh WIFI channels that don't overlap with nearby channels. See which of 1,6,11 is least used by neighbors and change to that. Also, don't allow your router to use any sort of "smart channel" management (where it moves around automatically to different channels.).

[Bimmerstyle]

Thanks for the info. I didn't know that about channels 1, 6 and 11. 6 and eleven are pretty congested allready. Channel 1 however, it seems like there is only one other person using this. I'll look into changing my router to channel 1 tomorrow.