I am running Roon on a Windows 10 computer and streaming songs from Tidal in many situations I hear skipping at the beginning of songs. If I have paused a song, and press Play again on the same song or even another song, the song starts playing fine with no skips after a 2 second pause. It seems to be honoring my re-sync time of 2000 ms. Without pausing the song, I select play on another song, I do not get the 2 second pause and instead the song starts playing with some samples skipped. If I let the player continue to the next song, I also hear skips at the beginning of the song. I was able to record what I am hearing into a WAV file and loaded it into some software I wrote that identifies skipped samples (dropped).
Looking at the network traffic, it appears as though Roon player is having a difficult time filling the ASIO driver buffer with samples while it is reading the file from the HTTP get response. Is there a setting which will not start the song until all of the data from the Tidal stream has been loaded and processed? Or is there a setting which allows the player to continue playing the song without skipping while the rest of the song is being loaded into the player?
Welcome to the forum and thanks for the report. I will discuss your findings with the technical team, but can you please provide some more information regarding your setup?
On what kind of DAC were these measurements performed? What is the model/manufacturer and how is it connected to the Core?
What kind of audio content were you playing to reproduce this issue? Was it 44.1/16 FLAC files or another type? Was the queued up track also a 44.1/16 file?
What is your network setup like, can you list the model/manufacturer of your networking gear?
For these measurements in the graph I did not go to analog. The samples were captured from the ASIO input channels (Loopback 1 and 2) of the ASIO driver for my Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 interface by a Reaper DAW and saved to a WAV file in 44.1\16. This is all running on a Z800 with 2 Intel Xeon CPU X5660 @ 2.8GHz and 24GB RAM.
This was a 44.1/16 FLAC. Yes, the second track was also a 44.1/16 FLAC.
I have my Z800 connected through ethernet to DD-WRT flashed Linksys WRT610N v2 1gigabit router connected to a Xfinity broadband modem.
@noris After further analysis, it seems the dropped samples are occurring more regularly when Reaper is running. As I mentioned in my system description, I use Reaper to capture the samples Roon sends to the ASIO driver. I do not see these problems when Roon plays files on local disk (not streamed) nor do I see problems when Audirvana player plays Tidal streams when Reaper is capturing. This seems to be a problem with Roon player not managing the Tidal stream properly while another App is running on Windows 10.
@noris I improved my capturing technique by grabbing samples directly from the ASIO driver in a Visual Studio C# Windows App I wrote. Looking at the ASIO driver buffers populated by Roon player, I do not see any dropped samples in the middle of the song.
My theory is that Reaper was causing the dropped samples because its interaction with the ASIO driver (from Focusrite Saffire Pro 24) was incompatible with Roon’s use of the driver.
After this analysis I do not feel Roon has a problem here and you can mark this issue as NFA.
Thanks for any time or effort your team has done to look into this further.
