Audio stops playing on Linux Bridge after a few seconds (ref#XG6B7N)

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1

What’s happening?

· Audio Stops

How can we help?

· None of the above

Other options

· Other

Describe the issue

Audio stops playing on linux bridge after a few seconds

Describe your network setup

Wired GBit ethernet netgear switch.

This is mostly a “if you have this problem then…” post, as I managed to work around the problem in the end.

Anyway, as title - a bit of investigation shows RAAT dropouts:

09/28 16:44:15 Warn: [RAAT::SMSL USB AUDIO] dropout of 14112 samples at 24087072 [2]

And a little bit more investigation shows that the server is delivering stored CD audio to the bridge at 5.6MiBytes / second. Presumably this is because I turned on sample rate conversion for the machine the server is running on as an experiment and it copied that setting to the network devices as well.

Turning off SRC for the remote fixed the problem, although if SRC was important to me I would expect it to be applied by the bridge where possible, not the server.

2

Roon’s endpoints are meant to be as light computationally as possible. Roon performs all Sample Rate Conversions on the server first and then sends the raw PCM output to the endpoint. This means that the resulting stream can be much bigger to the endpoint than the originating source.

3

Yeah, I get that, it’s just not the right approach for anything except really dumb hardware. If I’ve got a networked DAC or something like a KEF LSX endpoint then it’s great, but for anything like a Raspberry PI upwards you’re putting too much pressure on the network → audio stack’s timing compared to a USB DACs maximum bitrate.

Given that is Roon’s approach, it’s probably worth mentioning it up-front in the DSP.