Xion Audio Player

Trouble with playback over network

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Postby regener8ed » December 23rd, 2013, 6:53 am

I store my music on a NAS which I then access from a variety of machines across the house (usually wireless.) When I queue files from this NAS in Xion, it very often will skip every other song - it pauses for a moment on the next song in the playlist as if it's trying to access info, but then moves on to the next. If i click directly on any song in the playlist it will play the song, but in normal playlist progression it acts as though perhaps the latency of the network is causing it to move on to the next song before the previous track really had a chance to respond. I don't get this behavior from any other player, just Xion.
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Postby Cliff Cawley » December 28th, 2013, 8:34 am

Hi regener8ed,

Thanks for reporting, I will run some tests here to see if I can reproduce.

How are you accessing the songs from Xion? Have you got a mapped network drive or are you accessing it directly via a \\nasmachine\folder share?

Cliff :)
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Postby regener8ed » December 29th, 2013, 3:00 am

I prefer to use URIs and not map drives, and I didn't bother testing it both ways but I'll give it a go and let you know what I find. (Probably also need to perform some due diligence with additional machines, just to be sure.) BTW - Xion doesn't flag the entry as bad or missing, it simply moves on and it might very well get played the next time around.
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Postby Cliff Cawley » January 4th, 2014, 10:35 pm

Ok, I think what might be happening is Xion is trying to pre-cache the next song when it gets near the end of the current song.

There might be an issue with crossfading. I just double checked the code and it looks like with Crossfading on, it pre-caches it the Crossfade time + 2 seconds away from the end.

Depending what your crossfade setting is, this could end up being small.

The default time without crossfading is 5 seconds.

If you normally have cross fading enabled and your cross fade time is less than 3 seconds, then this might be the issue.

As a test, can you disable Crossfading (Configure->Settings Tab->Uncheck Crossfade between tracks). This will give it up to 5 seconds to pre-cache it.

If this works much better for you, then I will know what the problem is and can fix it.

Let me know how it goes.

Cliff :)
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Postby regener8ed » January 7th, 2014, 12:25 am

Cliff Cawley Wrote:If you normally have cross fading enabled and your cross fade time is less than 3 seconds, then this might be the issue.


FWIW, I can confirm that this is indeed the case with my settings.

I've been trying to come up with a consistent scenario to be able to report this behavior, but so far I haven't gotten anything to reliably duplicate this behavior every time. Some days it happens frequently, sometimes it's once in a while, and sometimes I can't seem to duplicate it at all.
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Postby logokas » January 8th, 2014, 8:25 pm

Overload your NAS with some sort of heavy file transfer and then try playing back audio files. The added load will add to the possibility of being timed out too quickly due to network load times. Gives you a better chance of reproducing.
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Postby regener8ed » January 8th, 2014, 11:47 pm

logokas Wrote:Overload your NAS with some sort of heavy file transfer and then try playing back audio files. The added load will add to the possibility of being timed out too quickly due to network load times. Gives you a better chance of reproducing.


that's one of the things i've tried, and all it does is make the playback stutter constantly. and in that case i already know what the problem is and that it is external to Xion: the key thing to me is that when Xion does exhibit the issue, none of the other players i also try ever have that same problem. it seems like it may be a perfect storm sort of thing with my setup that when combined with certain crossfading aspects in Xion this behavior surfaces. but it's not a significant enough issue to lose sleep over.
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Postby Cliff Cawley » January 9th, 2014, 4:56 pm

regener8ed Wrote:
logokas Wrote:Overload your NAS with some sort of heavy file transfer and then try playing back audio files. The added load will add to the possibility of being timed out too quickly due to network load times. Gives you a better chance of reproducing.


that's one of the things i've tried, and all it does is make the playback stutter constantly. and in that case i already know what the problem is and that it is external to Xion: the key thing to me is that when Xion does exhibit the issue, none of the other players i also try ever have that same problem. it seems like it may be a perfect storm sort of thing with my setup that when combined with certain crossfading aspects in Xion this behavior surfaces. but it's not a significant enough issue to lose sleep over.


I overloaded the network while doing this and testing with Xion, Foobar and Winamp.

Foobar took a while to start playing each song, but seemed to play ok, however changing the progress slider around resulted in it taking up to 7 seconds to start playing again.

Winamp locked up for almost 20 seconds for each new song. The first 10 seconds it would lock up and then the music would start playing but the player would still be locked up for another 10 seconds. It also stopped playing the music every 10 seconds (assuming it was buffering)

I was surprised when Xion actually started playing the tracks faster. Only about 4 seconds on a saturated wifi link to the NAS. There was a small lockup while the song loaded from double clicking which I need to look at fixing. There was no lockup if the crossfade/preload was allowed to go ahead.

I'll go ahead and tweak the cross fade times to allow for network latency and see if that helps. Let me know how build 155 goes when it's out :)
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Postby regener8ed » February 13th, 2014, 4:40 am

FYI, I encountered this issue again yesterday. I'm using b155 on a fresh install of Win7.32, connected to the network with a usb wireless adapter. I turned the default crossfading off which initially didn't seem to make a difference, but after a couple songs the problem seemed to go away.
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