Build 88 HQPlayer connection seems to be unstable

The ‘connection’ between Roon and HQPlayer seems to be unstable. Sometimes I press play in Roon but the music is not moving and there is no sound. I have to go into settings in HQP, re-select the DAC, or somehow ‘refresh’ the whole connection before music plays.

Using Roon on Mac.

P/S anyone found any ‘best’ settings for HQP for PSA DirectStream?

I found that stability issues between Roon and HQP were reduced if I used ctrl-t to Stop play in Roon, rather than the Pause control. I was restarting HQP to refresh the connection, but re-selecting the DAC sounds simpler.

If you can reliably reproduce the loss of connection from a defined series of steps please let @brian know as that will be the start of a solution.

1 Like

If you can reliably reproduce the loss of connection from a defined series of steps please let @brian know as that will be the start of a solution.

Definitely. There were a couple of scattered reliability issues during Alpha testing that we never were able to make reproducible in-house. I’m sure they’re still out there, and at some point someone will land on a reliable way to make them happen so that they can be fixed.

There’s also a “disconnect” button (click the volume button…it’s the “breaking link” icon). This also does a nice hard stop + resets the control connection to HQPlayer, and it works on touchscreen devices, unlike ctrl-t.

P/S anyone found any ‘best’ settings for HQP for PSA DirectStream?

Someone might have an idea here, but there are a lot more HQPlayer veterans hanging around at http://www.computeraudiophile.com/, including HQPlayer’s creator. You might want to ask there, too.

1 Like

I can report an identical issue reported by several other users on the “How do I use HQP/Roon” topic: sometimes at the end of a single song/playlist/album sound stops, even though the Roon interface makes it look like playback continues. Apparently some sort of connection issue between HQP and Roon at the “end” of whatever playlist has been chosen.
You can’t just choose new music and continue playback. The programs have to be closed to get playback working again.

Disconnection problems have been reported but have not been reliably reproduced. The problem is the “sometimes”. If you can find a set of procedures that results in disconnection every time, then please let @brian know as that will be the start of a solution.

I suspect that, in this situation, you can recover by pressing the “disconnect” button in Roon (click the volume icon, and then the “break link” icon) and without restarting either app.

If that’s not the case, try restarting just HQPlayer. Restarting Roon should be a last resort–I can’t imagine a situation where forcing a disconnect would have a different effect than a full Roon restart.

We are still looking for a way to reproduce the problem. I’m unsure whether it’s on our end or HQPlayer’s, and we haven’t seen it in house yet, despite several multi-hour listening sessions where we were explicitly looking for this issue.

My gut says it’s timing related, so it may be dependent on filter selections and/or hardware. It’s hard to say without reproducing the problem under a microscope, though.

I know @andybob has seen it personally, but he also can’t produce it on demand. This is a tricky one.

Hi @brian , I thought this was an interesting quote from Jussi in this CA thread :

Yes, mixed playlists are OK, but may not be gapless when source format changes. If source, filter/modulator and requested output conflicts, then playback stops at that point.

t may be barking up a completely irrelevant tree, but the reported issues do have a feel of HQP stopping playing while Roon thinks play is continuing (except that the play bar doesn’t move). There also seems to be a buffer that HQP continues playing from after a transport command issues from Roon. When does Roon tell HQP what the next song is ? Is it possible that some timing or buffering issue results in HQP thinking there is an output conflict ?

Brian said:
My gut says it’s timing related, so it may be dependent on filter
selections and/or hardware. It’s hard to say without reproducing the
problem under a microscope, though.

I think this may have something to do with it. Before using the HQP feature (i.e., Roon by itself), I had setup a 500 ms delay in Roon, because my DAC was losing connection between songs when succeeding songs in a playlist were in different formats. An issue of my DAC driver, I think - it couldn’t switch between different formats fast enough. The delay solved that problem.

I’m now playing back through HQP, and I’ve experienced the problem talked about here with disconnects at the end of a playlist in Roon. Earlier today I reduced the delay in Roon that I’d previously specified from 500ms to 100ms, and also have added a 70ms delay in HQP. So far that seems to have eliminated the problem. It also doesn’t hurt that because I’m now playing back through HQP every feed to my DAC is either in DSD or in PCM - no mixed formats.

I will take the delays in Roon and HQP off entirely later today and see if I can reproduce the problem when there is no delay programmed in.

Okay, spoke to soon in my last post. I’m still having the “lost connection” problem when playing back through HQP. But the workaround suggested above: clicking the “disconnect” icon in the volume control in Roon does allow me to resume playback.

Maybe that’s a clue for the technical people about what is going on.

I know that others have reported unusual behavior, but figured I’d better throw this one in:

While listening last night, playback would stop at random points. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it; it would just stop.

I was playing back Tidal albums. Stoppage would tend to occur between tracks. Nothing “crashed”. I’d just go to the queue and click on the next song, and things would continue as usual. This happened at least four or five times.

Running Build 88 on OS X 10.9.5, Mac Mini as Core, library on FW800 HDD, iMac as Remote, HQP 3.12beta.

This is not a huge issue for me; it could be worse. But I can’t seem to find a reason why playback would simply halt without anything crashing.

Hi Rob,

There are known issues with halting between tracks when streaming to HQP which the devs are currently trying to reproduce and fix. Was this happening for you when zones other than HQP were selected ?

Hi, Andy,

Can’t say that it ever happened before I used HQP. Seems to be fairly frequent now.

Well, I don’t know if “connection” is the right word.

The issue I’m having is that if I try to skip to the next track, or if I make changes on the HQP side, or if I select another track without hitting CMD-T first, the next track I choose does not play.

Every time, I can click on the speaker icon in Roon, and then click on the link symbol, and that will allow the next track to play.

I am experiencing the same thing.

1 Like

Same here, but not every time, seems random. Since the updated iPad app isn’t out I need to quite HQP and relaunch (I’m running RoonServer on my MacMini)… It’s not a huge deal but obviously I want it to be addressed.

When I play music with my library every thing works fine.If I play a song from tidal library when song ends it won’t keep playing other music.It will show the link symbol often Hqplayer will quit.Same thing with DSD files will play the one song and lose connection ?

I’ve seen the same issue (first though it was me getting old, forgetting I stopped it).
But also not able to reproduce with same playlist, filters, etc.

The only thing that seems to be somewhat reproducible is the following:

  • I always leave NUC & rpi on
  • when I want to start some music on the new day and hit play, nothing happens
  • when I vnc into the NUC, a second or so later music starts
  • I just vnc in, don’t do anything else

Just in case it helps…