Problems with 24bit & DSD

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1

I’ve been reading this with interest because I have a very similar issue. The difference is I had a perfectly working Roon system from a NAS running on an under spec’d 2008 iMac (Core 2 duo) on El Capitan and then recently updated updated to an over spec’d 2019 iMac i9 with 8 cores. And with the new Mac the same issues would happen, but only with High Res music: 24bit and DSD.

I have not read through this entire thread but what has appeared to have worked for me was enabling Jumbo frames on the Ethernet interface. I hope this helps others.

Update: Ok this did not FIX the problem but it did make it better. I was able to play a full DSD album without stalling. But a 192/24bit album would stall and skip on almost each track.

Note that nothing has changed in my setup between the working version and the now stalling version except the Mac hardware and operating system version. I restored the Roon setup from a backup and the music files are on the same share on the same NAS and my networking Roon endpoints have not changed. All endpoints are on CAT6 Ethernet.

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3

Hi @Simon_Block,

Just to confirm, you could play 24bit and DSD content to the same endpoints from the previous Mac Core without issues?

Can you describe your current networking setup and describe the audio devices you’re using and how they’re connected?

4

Yes with the previous Core2 duo iMac on El Capitan I never had an issue playing DSD (64) or 192/24bit files. On the new 8 core i9 on Mojave I have had issues with both DSD and any High Res file.
When I enabled Jumbo frames I have found I could play an entire DSD 64 album without issue, but I recently found that the 192/24bit tracks would not play (Purple Rain so no great loss!).

I migrated to the new machine via a backup and restore and the restore appeared to work well, but then I noticed the errors on larger high res files.

The setup is EXACLY the same between both systems except for the Core hardware and operating system. The same share is used from the same NAS to access the files. The measured R/W speeds from the NAS are:
Read: 86 MB/sec
Write: 41 MB/sec

This machine also streams HD and 4K video from the same NAS with no issue. The shares are via AFP as I found it was faster than SMB.

Network topology:

Broadband (50mb/s/20mb/sec) to Asus RT-AC68U router (running LAN)
Asus -> Cisco SG300 28 port managed switch
All connected to switch via CAT6 Ethernet:

  • Allo DigiOne (Roon Endpoint) -> SPDIF -> Cyrus 8xpd -> dual Cyrus X200’s - PMC OB1i speakers
  • NAS QNAP TS259 Pro+ (dual bonded Ethernet)
  • Roon Core: iMac i9 8 core beast
  • Several Airport expresses

If you can give me some instructions I am happy to capture some logs and Wireshark traces during a failure. I can capture traffic from the iMac.

I like Roon but but I really want it to be a lot more stable and perform better and faster.
PS> I have a DSP parametric eq running on the Allo endpoint but even the Core2 duo could run this ok.

Cheers.

5

Actually things are getting worse. I have had to kill off Roon tonight as it was consuming 200% CPU and running the fans on my Mac. Even if nothing is playing!

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Hi @Simon_Block,

Is the CPU going to 100% or higher every time you open Roon?

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This morning I restarted my Mac and the cpu issue went away. CPU now sits around 2-5%.

Last night when I restarted Roon without rebooting the CPU jumped backup to around 200% every time.

However the 24/192 issue is still there.

Note that I keep my mac booted and Roon running. At night I have it playing a 10 min white noise mp3 track to my sons room on continuous loop and I generally play an ambient album in our room.

Apart from that I just use it casually in the evening and weekends.

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Here is a segment of the logs from the playing of Purple Rain this morning.
"Let’s Go Crazy played all the way through without error, but most of the subsequent tracks had errors and skipped to the next.

Logfile

I was not watching the UI when the skip occurred but from previous experience it shows this:

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Tonight I’ll capture a packet capture to the endpoint.

Also of note: I can play the same files, from the same NAS using the same server with Plex, without any dropouts. Plex might be downsampling the HighRes file, but it is still reading (streaming) it from the NAS.

Roon shows evidence of not reading the media fast enough:

06/26 07:32:56 Trace: [Lounge] [Enhanced, 24/192 ALAC => 24/192] [3% buf] [PLAYING @ 0:25/3:53] Take Me With U - Prince and the Revolution / Apollonia
06/26 07:32:56 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:32:57 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:32:58 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:32:59 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:00 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:01 Trace: [Lounge] [Enhanced, 24/192 ALAC => 24/192] [1% buf] [PLAYING @ 0:30/3:53] Take Me With U - Prince and the Revolution / Apollonia
06/26 07:33:01 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:01 Trace: [Lounge] [zoneplayer/raat] sync snd_allo_digione: realtime=308821838543 rtt=500us offset=-617966161us delta=657us drift=11677us in 308.734s (37.823ppm, 136.164ms/hr)
06/26 07:33:02 Info: [stats] 8071mb Virtual, 1445mb Physical, 425mb Managed, 79 Threads, FDs
06/26 07:33:02 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:03 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:27204}
06/26 07:33:03 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:03 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:87044}
06/26 07:33:03 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:04 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/26 07:33:04 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:04 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/26 07:33:05 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/26 07:33:05 Debug: [prebuffer] sleeping in read – this isn’t good
06/26 07:33:05 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/26 07:33:06 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [7] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/26 07:33:06 Warn: [Lounge] [zoneplayer/raat] Too many dropouts (>3s dropped out in the last 30s). Killing stream
06/26 07:33:06 Trace: [Lounge] [zoneplayer/raat] too many dropouts. stopping stream
06/26 07:33:06 Info: [Lounge] [zoneplayer] advance didn’t change the track. returning short read
06/26 07:33:06 Warn: Track Stopped Due to Slow Media

Also there are a number of NullReferenceExceptions:

06/26 07:33:57 Critical: Library.EndMutation: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
at Sooloos.Broker.Music.UnifiedSearchResults.EndMutation () [0x00009] in :0
at Sooloos.Broker.Music.LibraryIndex.UpdateSearchResults () [0x00041] in :0
at Sooloos.Broker.Music.Library.EndMutation () [0x0025a] in :0
06/26 07:33:57 Trace: [library] endmutation in 32ms

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@dylan
Please find a logfile and packet trace here:
zipfile

Note that the localtime in the Roon log is UTC+10, so add 10 hours to the recorded times in the packet capture.
The packet capture contains several dropouts for session played between 17:26 and 17:29 local time.
For reference the Allo DigiOne endpoint is at 192.168.23.177 and the Roon Core iMac is 192.168.23.10. The packet capture is filtered for only traffic to the Endpoint. I might need to capture the NAS traffic as well but let me know what you can see.

Cheers.

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Thanks for the logs and timestamps here, @Simon_Block.

I’ve passed this along to the technical team so they can analyze the logs you’ve sent over. I’ll be sure to update you ASAP when I have their feedback here.

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I’m having problems playing HD tracks as well. Roon Core is installed on a high end Dell I7 Laptop. Streaming to my Squeezebox Touch. Music Files are located on a Diskstation ds415play. Trying to play 96Khz tracks keep dropping out. Never had this problem running logitech server on the Diskstation. Love the Roon UI and all the features but for the $500+ dollars that I paid for this thing I would expect it to work flawlessly, if my freeware Logitech server running on an underpowered NAS can handle it with out breaking a sweat.

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Hi @dylan, I have an update as I have solved my issue!

I am running a Plex server in parallel and I also had the exact same Plex server running on the older hardware, with no issues. But I had changed the media scanning options. Plex is also scanning the same Music files as Roon and the 2 appear to co-exist in relative harmony. However I had noticed that the Plex Music library was being scanned a lot.

So I disabled the option to “scan my library automatically” in Plex. I left the periodic scan as “daily”.

Yesterday afternoon I set Purple Rain to play in a loop at 192/24bit. Then I monitored the logfile for dropouts:

$ tail -f Roon_log.txt | grep Dropout
06/28 02:03:31 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:40252}
06/28 02:03:32 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/28 02:03:32 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/28 02:03:33 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:99840}
06/28 02:03:33 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/28 02:03:34 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}
06/28 02:03:34 Trace: [snd_allo_digione] [raatclient] GOT [55] {“status”:“Dropout”,“samples”:96000}

I started the test at about 3pm on 06/27 and only got one dropout at 2am the next day and none since! My guess is this is when Plex kicked in its daily scan. Only one track skipped.

I have looked though the Plex logs for confirmation of this but they are hideously confusing. I’ll keep digging for this evidence. But I’m reasonably satisfied that I have resolved the issue or at least avoided it. My guess is I’ll have another dropout event at 2am tomorrow morning.

Funny that the Plex has been recording 2 parallel HD streams to my NAS (although on a different logical volume) without affecting the Roon stream. Something about the Plex media scanner auto setting on the Music was causing contention for the filesystem. I have even tried manually enabling a scan of the Music library in Plex without affecting Roon.

Question:
Does Roon modify the media folder in anyway during playback? Even file metadata? This may cause Plex to trigger a scan.

I hope this helps others!

BTW: I would not be using Plex for music if I could access my music library from outside my home! Just a hint! Plex does a very good job of this.

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@song_hong have a look at my post.
Do you have any other music servers running on the Dell or you’re NAS at the same time?

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No, I have logitech media server that I used to use but it’s turned off on the diskstation per roon recommendation

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Seems it may not be the Music scanning after all, but the “deep analysis” by the Plex “Butler”:

Jun 28, 2019 02:01:18.657 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: 2019 - Round 15 - Essendon V GWS Giants
Jun 28, 2019 02:03:03.417 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: Green Room
Jun 28, 2019 02:03:36.788 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: Episode 06-27
Jun 28, 2019 02:03:50.465 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: June 27, 2019
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.184 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: 2019-01-22 19.03.29
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.348 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010036
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.430 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010031
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.515 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010030
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.600 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010029
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.692 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010028
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.783 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010027
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.869 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010026
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:24.950 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010025
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:25.032 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GX010024
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:25.115 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: GH010037
Jun 28, 2019 02:04:25.196 [0x70000ca5a000] DEBUG - Butler: Scheduling deep analysis for: 2018-12-22 10.04.43

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Hi @Simon_Block,

No, Roon does not modify file metadata. The only time Roon will make any alterations to your actual files is when you tell Roon to delete a track, which deletes the file.

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