Chromecast: Intermittent Playback Interruptions on Some Cast Audio Endpoints Due to Buffer Handling [Investigating]

I l try to pay attention but now with the wired connection the drop out are quite small… it does not stop the track where before the track would stop and re-start later or even failed completely.

With the wired connection the drop is minimal…

After disabling as many DSP functions as I could ( some were still present, if you know how to remove them all let me know ) the short dropouts are still present with Tidal and Qobuz through Roon. Tidal direct on the NAIM has no drop out.

Help. It feels like it is 20 years ago where small drop outs like this were the norm with slower internet service provider.

Should I bite the bullet and move to Ubuntu and the Roon server on the NUC?
Working in the industrial automation industry, I did appreciate the simplicity of the ROCK ( our customers loves this type of appliance as well ) but it seems there is an underlying issue…

I’m pretty sure your Ubuntu idea wouldn’t change anything.
But… I now read three different recent threads here telling about some dropout issue. All with different endpoints, but all using Chromecast at the very last “output”. So, it may be related to roon or the Chromecast implementation in these endpoints.
I can only recommend put as few elements/technologies as possible in your roon “line”. The more there are in your whole connection the more potential issues you’ll get. Maybe you should rethink your overall connections.
And there’s no point in looking back when the issue was not present. Many components have updatable software which often improves things but can also introduce new issues. That’s one reason why I disabled any auto update.
BTW, you don’t have to remove all DSP filters. You just need to click on “bypass filters”. The little slider will get red.

I want to get rid of the Chromecast but it did work well before I installed the Rock NUC combination instead of the Roon server - Synology combination where I never experienced drop out, just slow interface.

Yes the plan is to get a new Roon enabled player… just priorities!

Understand :slightly_smiling_face:
One more question regarding your NUC, since I also had some sort of nightmares about this. Do you have any devices attached to the NUC? I experienced lots of audio issues when attaching quite different devices to it. And I never found out why.

Hi @William_McFee ,

Thanks for your report here. We’ve enabled some additional diagnostics for your account to see if we can trace where the issue is happening. Can you please restart your RoonServer twice via the Web UI so that it can pick up the new diagnostic mode?

Then after the system is up and running again, please let us know the exact local time + date + track when you next observe this behavior, and we can look over the logging afterwards. Thanks!

Hi @Andre_Babineau,

We’ve revisited this report and confirmed that diagnostics associated with your account from the last few weeks appear to be consistent with this symptom.

There appear to be additional network failures calling upstream servers - it might be worth verifying whether or not a known reliable DNS server is assigned in your router GUI.

However, the team is investigating reports of dropouts with Chromecast audio devices that appear to be associated with an invalid session ID.

@maddib’s assessment is accurate. Your network itself might be vulnerable to dropouts depending on settings and implementation, but since dropouts only replicate with Chromecast and you can’t reliably reproduce with another endpoint/protocol, you’re likely encountering a Chromecast/Roon issue under investigation.

Hi @William_McFee,

We’ve identified a vulnerability in the buffer handling between Roon and Chromecast that’s causing these intermittent playback dropouts. It’s likely specific to a handful of devices, so the team is gathering information on this case to help inform future implementation that can account for and prevent these errors.

Airplay or another protocol, if available, is probably the most reliable workaround to fully prevent this in the meantime. We’ll keep this ticket open to track our investigation and post updates here when they are available.

Thanks Connor, I am pleased to know that you have found what you believe may be the issue. I like using chromecast for it’s ability to do display as well as being an audio endpoint in the same device. Keep us all posted on this progress. My system is still in logging mode AFAIK, as per earlier instructions. I will let you know if I am ever in a place where I can record the time and song when it stops. Thanks again!

Hi @Andre_Babineau,

We’re working with development on the Chromecast audio issue reported in this thread and need a few more details at your convenience.

Do you mind checking the current firmware version installed on your Naim Uniti2 endpoint? Is it [4.6, the latest release, or are you running 4.4 still?

Connor,

the version of the streamer is 4.8 and the Iphone app is version 6.6.1

Andre

Hi @Andre_Babineau,

Perfect, thank you. I will merge your report with the main tracking thread momentarily so that you can receive updates as the team proceeds with our investigation.

If you use another protocol to stream to this endpoint, like Airplay, etc., do you have any issues? We still want to try to diagnose any unrelated network connectivity issues that might exacerbate the problem.

Hi everyone,

The team released a fix for this issue several years ago (2022), but we’ve seen intermittent reports of issues with gapless playback in Chromecast over the years since. This particular thread never reached a conclusion, and in light of more recent reports, we want to reach back out to see if anyone has experienced recent gapless playback problems.

Please share the name of any tracks that failed to transition properly and we’ll investigate logs accordingly. Thank you!