Pops During Playback

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

I have a really weird one here for you support guys to play with.

I have a song I downloaded from iTunes that pops at specific places during playback when I play the song through Roon. It does not pop at all when I play back through iTunes. The song is “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt from the album “The Best of Bonnie Raitt”. One specific place in the song is at the 2:01 mark.

If support needs the song I can send the track to someone to test.

I also noticed this behavior with “Look of Love” by Dusty Springfield from her “The Very Best of Dusty Springfield” album.

[DrTone (Jeff)]

Build 334: AAC 24bit conversion - audio artefacts [Resolved B339]

I just did a test with the ffmpeg 4.0 package and copied it into its own “bin” folder in the RoonServer app directory. Then I added the app “bin” path to the PATH variable in the start script. This works and it should be possible to ship ffmpeg with the RoonServer app. Did not check Synology yet.

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

I am using a sonicTransporter i5 to both a Schiit Eitr-Modi Multibit and to a PS Audio DirectStream DAC. This does seem to happen with iTunes AAC files and not my FLAC files. I wonder if @agillis has seen this and has an answer?

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

Also, these pops happen even if I convert PCM to DSD64 when using the DirectStream.

[agillis (Andrew Gillis)]

There are quite a few different versions of AAC files. I’m not sure Roon has 100% support for all of them.

I have have a few customers with a few problems with some AAC files. In these cases only iTunes could play them back correctly other programs like Roon, jRiver, or LMS had problems.

The solution was to convert them to FLAC using dbpoweramp. In all cases they player perfectly after the conversion.

[eric (Eric Stewart)]

@Speed_Racer — Thank you for your feedback and sharing this observations you have made since taking the update to B334. The insight has been greatly appreciated!

I have went ahead and opened up a ticket in our system containing all the information you have provided here. Our tech team is currently investigating and once I have an update on their progress I will be sure to touch base again ASAP.

In the meantime, may I very kindly ask you to please send over the media you mentioned in your first post via a shared dropbox link in a PM addressed to me for testing purposes.

Again, thank you for your patience and understanding while we try to get to the bottom of this!
-Eric

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

PM sent. Thank you for looking into this!

[eric (Eric Stewart)]

@Speed_Racer — Thanks for the follow up! Confirming that I have seen your PM and have downloaded/attached the provided media to your ticket for our tech team.

-Eric

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

Eric,

Andrew at SGC has updated the sonicTransporter i5 software and this problem is now gone. He updated the ffmpeg files and, I guess, dependencies.

No more pops!!

Yay!

[agillis (Andrew Gillis)]

I updated to ffmpeg 4.0.1 and this seems to resolve the problem with some compressed AAC files when using the sonicTransporter as a Roon server.

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

I have had no popping with any AAC lossy files since I installed the update.

[Speed_Racer (Threatened Dinosaur)]

I continue to have no popping issues since @agillis updated the ffmpeg files in the sonicTransporter OS.