Thanks for writing in and sharing your report, sorry to hear about your playback issues!
As a first step in troubleshooting, can you please toggle on the AirPlay compatibility option within the zone settings when you have your AirPlay device enabled, and see if you still hear clicks?
Does this happen on lower-resolution files as well? From your screenshot, we see the original track is a 96 kHz FLAC file from Qobuz, see if playing a lower resolution tracks results in the same issues.
Can you also test out a temporary hardwire connection from your endpoint to your router and see if you run into the same issue?
We’re also seeing frequent 401 errors when attempting to play certain content on Tidal stating : "userMessage":"Session does not have streaming privileges"} it may be worth double-checking your Tidal subscription tier to ensure proper playback.
I tried turning the AirPlay compatibility option on and off, but neither resolved the issue.
When playing CD-quality audio sources and sending them to AirPlay directly from the source without going through RAAT, there do not appear to be any issues such as audio dropouts.
The WiiM mini I am using does not support wired LAN, so I cannot test a wired connection. However, other Roon Ready devices using the same wireless connection work perfectly.
The connection with Tidal also works without any issues. Since the same problem occurs with Qobuz audio sources, it seems unlikely to be an issue with the streaming service itself.
I have just sent you the file, recorded on an iPhone so the sound quality is not great, there is a loud pop of 2 seconds and a sudden drop in volume at 41 seconds and 1 minute 40 seconds. The volume drop occurs more frequently than the pop sound.
The frequency of noise occurrence varies from song to song. I have the impression that noise appears more frequently in orchestral pieces with a large amount of information.
The sound source is 192 kHz. See image file for playback conditions.
Thank you for taking the time to provide the file and the precise timestamps. We’ve pinpointed several events with 24/192 playback from streaming services over Airplay to the WiiM. There are generic background network interruptions (missing packets with the server download, etc.) from which Roon recovers gracefully - there’s not indication that playback is breaking. However, AirPlay2 itself occasionally re-requests missing packets, uncannily around the timestamps you’ve provided.
Network interruptions should introduce audible artifacts - in whichever protocol, Roon should either pause playback, simply drop playback, or present an error. We’d like to reproduce this issue in-house on the same equipment.
In the meantime, if convenient, please share the names of any additional tracks that manifest this behavior. We’ll use these to pinpoint additional events - it should expedite our developers’ investigation into the issue.
Thank you for your patience. Development has uncovered low-level RTSP errors with Airplay2 when playing to the WiiM endpoint - we’ll need to attempt to reproduce this in-house to determine whether this is an implementation problem with Roon/WiiM’s Airplay2 stack or a result of router-related QoS or packet scheduling issues.
To rule out the latter, try restricting your WiFi to a single band (2.4GHz) temporarily and see if you can reproduce the issue. Play only 16/44 files, FLAC format to rule out resync issues with downsampling during this test. Lastly, temporarily turn off any features related to multicast filtering in the router to see if you can reproduce the problem.
We’ll follow up on our end once we know more. Thanks!
I changed it to 2.4GHz and played a 16/44 file, but there were no problems. However, even with 5GHz, there were no problems with 16/44 files.
I’m not sure what the multicast filtering function is, but I changed the IPv6 multicast setting from ‘forward all’ to ‘do not forward streaming,’ but there was no change.
Noise and sound attenuation do not occur consistently at the same points in the same track. They occur randomly. For example, the following clip has frequent noise and sound attenuation from the beginning:
Thanks for the additional information @Satoshi_Aoyagi - we should have more details to share once our development team has had time to investigate further, which should be later this week.
Development is combing through the diagnostic reports from RoonServer to inspect the Airplay2 commands passing between the WiiM and RoonServer. If there’s some disagreement with implementation causing volume skips or transcoding errors, we’ll find it shortly.
In the meantime, however, more recent diagnostics from your RoonServer show RTSP (the audio streaming protocol underlying Airplay) often loses the network route to the host - RoonServer’s Airplay stack is sometimes unable to identify a layer-2 address corresponding to the WiiM and vice versa.
This type of ephemeral traffic interruption usually indicates that network software elsewhere on the LAN is actively scheduling packets or optimizing routes in a way that RoonServer doesn’t expect. Forgive the redundancy if we’ve already asked for this information, but it will help to have it laid out clearly:
What is the actual network pathway between RoonServer, the router, and the WiiM? Do you have any managed switches or second routers in between?
