Build 94 HQ Player connection problems [SOLVED]

The suspicion is that its a timing/buffering thing. If we can track down exactly where or how the timing or buffering is causing a disconnect, then Brian and Jussi should be able to fix it.

[quote=ā€œzorntel, post:18, topic:6898ā€]
So Iā€™m having repeated problems trying to play a DSD64 albumā€¦I try to stop HQplayer with the stop button in the hqplayer interfaceā€¦spinning wheel of death and I have to force quite. [/quote]

This is almost definitely an HQPlayer bug. No matter what Roon does, HQPlayer should not freeze up like that. I donā€™t think this is related to the other issues people are describing.

Thanks for editing/curating all this andybob.

On my setup the situation is definitely better on server 94 than it was on server 88.

What platform is your Roon server running on? Windows 7 64bit
What platform is HQPlayer running on? Windows server 2012 R2 (standard install, no audiophile optimiser or any other optimisations) playing from hqplayer into jplay.
Are they on the same machine? no
Is NAA involved? If so, describe the setup. Sorry, donā€™t know what that is.
What DAC are you using? DIY using dual mono ESS 9018
What are the DAC settings in HQPlayer?
What filters are selected in HQPlayer? polysinc-ext/ASD7/192/default for bit depth/no other boxes ticked
What steps do you need to take to cause the problem to happen? Be specific as to which file formats you are playing, buttons you are pushing, and everything that you did between the beginning of your playback session and the failure.

if I use fwd/back buttons the playback will stop and I will need to hit play again to start playback of the next track.

With about 10% of tracks during track changeover HQP connectivity is lost (generally because it has crashed). This happens virtually always with higher bitrates/depth tracks.

platform: Win10 pro 64bit
HQP: same platform, same pc
NAA, yes, on SOtM SMS-100 (linux)
DAC: Mytek 192 DSD; the SMS-100 has a driver for the DAC
DAC Settings: USB to Mytek 192 DSD
Filters: upsampling to DSD64; poly-sinc-shrt-mp; ASDM7
steps to cause problem to happen:
Havenā€™t found any consistent culprit. Yesterday I was playing back a Redbook album and it stopped after every track. Other times is just seems to randomly pick a track and stop. All formats and bitrates, seemingly at random, without any consistency of whatā€™s playing before or after each selection. Usually I just need to click on the ā€œchain linkā€ under the volume icon to get everything working again.

I will try my setup without the NAA and with the Mytek Windows drivers to see if the experience is different.

Your setups are all different. Different platforms, NAA vs no NAA, different DACs, different performance levels, different OS versions, different filters. So there is no pattern there.

Most commonly, the issues arise when touching next/previous buttons or picking a new track. Basically, situations where one track is interrupting another.

A few of you have mentioned other problems. I want to make something clear: no matter what Roon does, HQPlayer should not beachball, crash, hang, or require a force-quit. Symptoms like that originate with code running inside of the HQPlayer process. If you are seeing these symptoms, I recommend pursuing them separately as HQPlayer issues. There is nothing we can do to help.

I have spent the last few hours banging on this. I have seen a problem or two, but it is very, very hard to make them happen. It feels strange to me that you guys are experiencing frequent failures if they are so difficult for me to produce. I worry that we are not seeing the same issue.

I have a feeling I know what we need to do. Thereā€™s some behavior in Roon that is trying to prevent unnecessary work starting/stopping HQPlayer engine during transport operations. This was done at Jussiā€™s request. I think it is doing more harm than good, and that some of the time, it is putting HQPlayer into a bad state. The most common failure mode Iā€™ve seen is one where HQPlayerā€™s cursor seems to fall off of the HQPlayer playlist. Once in this state, I canā€™t get anything to happen until I press ā€œstopā€ in HQPlayer (or press the disconnect button in Roon).

A few days ago, we discussed two approaches to managing these sorts of transport control transitions reliably. I think itā€™s time to try the other one. Itā€™s slightly less elegant, but I feel like it will be more reliable.

I have a problem. Fairly often (every day, and every listening session), Roon just wonā€™t play the ā€œnextā€ song. So, if I click forward, or select a new song, it just gets stuck. It appears that the song is playing (animated graphics moving next to the song - but the timeline doesnā€™t move. It just doesnā€™t play. If I reboot Roon - it goes back to the spot where I was - and works fine for a while.

Macmini Late 2014 i5 8 gb ram 500 SSD
Very fast and reliable Comcast broadband (150 mb)
Roon playes through HQPlayer
USB to IFI upconverter
Rega DAC
Rega Elex-R

@brian ā€“ I think youā€™re on the right track. Iā€™m using Roonserver@OS X, Pi NAA and doing only light upsampling in HQP to 96/24 PCM. HQP is problem-free.

Stalls occur only only when switching tracks midway (while a different track is playing ā€“ regularly) or at first start (rarely). Disconnecting in Roon solves this 100% of time ā€“ I never have to go back to HQP. It seems to me these stalls occur more often when thereā€™s also a format change involved (Redbook to Highres or the other way around).

Given I can make it happen so easily with DSD Iā€™m going to try some other tests todayā€¦no NAA, and also direct DSD in HQplayer to see if that made a problem. However, the problem is clearly with the Roon/HQplayer interface as HQplayer has now played on one of the ā€œproblemā€ machines through the same NAA for 12 hours straight without crashing when I just load the files directly into HQplayer without Roon being involved.

Just to be clear HQplayer only visibly crashes in my system after Roon has already stopped playingā€¦meaning the time is frozen. Of course that doesnā€™t say where the problem lies. Brian, your guess about the transfer algorithm might be right.

Yes, I get that same behavior and I played around with it further last night and was able to replicate it both in network (NAA) form and using the iDSD Nano attached directly to my main PC. Selecting the new track seems to drop the selected file from the lower window in HQP. I too get the animation of the song playing and the position slider actually moves forward which would indicate the file is being played from the NAS, but something got stuck in the upsampling process.

What I havenā€™t yet tried is whether I can replicate it if I do no audio processing at all in HQP (no reason to use it in that fashion), but it would at least indicate that the disruption is to the resampling or DSD conversion process in HQP.

Okā€¦it fails both with DSD upsampling and DSD straight through (direct SDM). Mid track Roon will just freeze. No button pushing necessary. The same album plays fine put directly into HQplayer either upsampled or direct. Iā€™ve also played it directly from Roon to the Auralic Vega DAC.

DSD64 album experiencing frequent stops during playback played 3 times on repeat upsampling to DSD128 through the NAA with no errors when it was placed directly into the HQplayer interface.

I think its pretty clear that the problem is with the data transfer between the two programsā€¦or with the way the HQplayer remote functions are responding to the Roon commands. However, my problems are typically premature stopping of a track (no button presses) during playback.

That said I have had a number of situations where push the play or play album button in roon and nothing happens in hqplayer. Other times Iā€™ve seen HQplayer engage (make a streaming track) but nothing plays. The track periodically blinks when this happens. If Iā€™m careful to pause playback and then wait for the track to disappear in hqplayer everything usually goes ok. Ctrl T also works well when I donā€™t want to listen to the track any longer. That said I still have to hit disconnect a bunch.

Robert

As a quick update Iā€™ve been ā€˜air playingā€™ roon into an entirely different stereo without hqplayer in the chain tonight. It was a much more solid experience except for occasional AirPlay dropouts but I experienced 2 occasions when I needed to press play to start the music again, after Iā€™d. Flicked the next track button.

So Maybe we"re conflating issues here?

I think you are on the right track. In this new build almost all my disconnects are coming when I manually switch tracks - not all, but most.

Same here except last night I played a dsf album and it disconnected 3 times in the middle of different songs and the other thing I noticed last night that when playing an album 16/44 from the beginning it needs to re-sync going from track 1 to 2 and then its fine (this has happened a few times with different albums).

EDIT: After some testing of more albums this re-sync going from track 1 to 2 is happening for every PCM 16 & 24bit albums, therefore having the biggest effect on gapless playback. Going from 2 to 3 and so on is fine and keeps the stream.

Iā€™m guessing the problem we are having is only with DSD (.dsf) filesā€¦Iā€™m also getting great performance with PCM up to DXD resolution. The DSD files crash everyt ime thoughā€¦not every trackā€¦but Iā€™ve never gotten through a whole album without multiple crashes.

Having less issues when using wired Ethernet. Wifi connectivity could very well be a factor. Upsampling requires a whole lot more bandwidth. CPU load and disk access also induces disconnects (less surprisingā€¦).

Roon & HQPlayer MBP i7 2.5 GHz/16GB
NAA on Mac mini 2 GHz i7

But I also have connection issues and Iā€™m not using wi-fi or DSD. HQ Player disconnects usually when selecting a new album or track to play but it can also do it stop mid album (after a track finishes).

I donā€™t currently use dsd Files, just pcm all of which are being Upsampled to 192\24. Iā€™m running wired from nas > roon server > hqp although the iPad controller is obviously wifi. Virtually all issues are during track change and virtually all of those are following using the fwd/back buttons.

Brian is this helping you? If not let us know what else we can report/test.

Robert

As of last night, we have a build in alpha testing that uses the new mechanism for transitioning between tracks I mentioned above. The main purpose of producing that alpha build was to give Jussi our latest to test/iterate against this weekend.

I think there are two issues. One related to transport controls getting out of sync, and one that causes the control connection between the two apps to freeze up. That build has changes that intend to address both of the issues.

Initial reports from alpha testers who use HQPlayer have been good so far. There are some un-related kinks in that build that need to be worked out before it can be released, but we will monitor it over the next few days and get it out as soon as possible.