RoPieeeXL - Pi reboot needed to use Librespot or Shairpoint

Audio Gear Talk RoPieee
1

Forgive me if this has been asked and answered in one of the many threads!

I use Roon 90% of the time, but occasionally I’ll have a need to play Spotify, or I might listen to a podcast via Airplay.

The selected Pi is always recognized (meaning, it’s seen in the list of available devices), but I’d say MOST of the time (80%?) I get no output when I hit play. Progress bar progresses, track timer runs, even the little signal meter shows something is playing. But I get no sound.

However, if I reboot the Pi, and then try again, all is copacetic.

Not sure if there’s a direct relationship with the length of time between reboots, but I would surmise the longer the Pi has gone before a reboot, the more likely I’ll need to reboot.

I NEVER have to reboot to play Roon.

I have Pi’s with HATs (Pi2AES) and Pi’s without HATs. I have Pi’s on Ethernet and a Pi on wifi.

Behavior seems the same for all configurations.

Again, not a major deal, but if it’s someone besides me wanting to play music, they get a little salty with me when they can’t.

:slight_smile:

Any thoughts?

2

Few thoughts.

Access to the audio device (HAT) is exclusive. This means that if one process has access (say Roon), the others can’t access it. And can’t play.

Normally it takes time (I believe for Roon it’s 3 seconds, as it is for both Spotify and Squeezelite) when the device is released when in pause.

This does not seem the case, as you state that progress bar is progressing. So that would mean that the service can access the device. But I’m wondering if this is not a volume problem. If you use software volume control and you play Roon and have the volume control set to a certain level (for arguments sake: 20%), then with software control it takes this as the whole range.

So how is your volume control set up?

3

Here it is for a couple that I recently used and had to reboot. Now, I don’t honestly know how/why I chose to set them this way for these services, but here we are…

Pi #1 (no HAT)
Shairpoint: NONE
Librespot: Software

Pi #2 (Pi2AES HAT)
Shairpoint: Software
Librespot: Software