I have a problem with gapless playback, which normally works completely fine with Roon and HQPlayer. Where there is a short track, the track that follows only starts after a pause. Roon on its own is gapless but not in conjunction with HQPlayer. Local playback and streaming from Qobuz of the same material is the same. Below is an example. Multiple versions of Rchard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony have the same problem - Am Wasserfall is around 15 seconds in all recordings and Erscheinung only follows after a short pause. Standard FLAC and HiRes recordings are the same. The same thing happens later in the Alpine Symphony after a 19 second track - there is a brief pause before play of the next track begins.
When playing such from Roon, HQPlayer should see only one stream coming through the entire album. You could check HQPlayer log file whether there was any “track change”. Likely not, so the issue would be that Roon has some lag retrieving and sending the next track and HQPlayer runs out of data to play.
It looks like my Roon delays sending the next track if the current one is around 16 seconds or less - but it’s 14 in your example. If it’s over, then no problem. There seems to be a threshold. This plays fine:
This is all very strange. There’s no problem with your Frankfurt recording (excellent by the way! Thank you.) but the Saito Kinen continues to give problems from Qobuz and local FLAC. I noticed the Frankfurt is 48/24 and Saito Kinen is 96/24 but I don’t think this is the problem - I continue to have the same issue with the Dresden/Kempe version (via Qobuz) and this is only 44/16. The BRSO/Jurowski 96/24 via Qobuz also pauses after the short movement. All these work normally via Roon alone and it looks like they also work correctly if played directly in HQPlayer (this is how you played them?) but not Roon+HQPlayer.
I think the conclusion is that the higher rate version has short enough tracks and large enough files that Roon has some lag fetching those in timely manner and that’s why there’s a pause providing data to HQPlayer.
Thank you for your time and advice on this matter.
Room manages to obtain these files of all sizes in a timely manner and send them to every other Roon endpoint on my network without problem. It is only to HQPlayer that there is a problem. Roon and HQPlayer reside on the same server and I’m wondering if the lag in communication could be internal to the server? It’s a pretty top specification though (AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor) and there is 64GB of RAM on board. The OS is Ubuntu 22.04 desktop. Could there be some settings in Ubuntu that I need to pay attention to?
The Roon communication with HQPlayer is different than what Roon does with it’s endpoints. So it is a bit of apples to oranges comparison. HQPlayer is not a regular Roon endpoint. There is no Roon endpoint code in HQPlayer at all.
HQPlayer doesn’t even know when the track changes in these cases, it only sees constant (or not so constant) stream of data from Roon. (you can check this form HQPlayer log file)
Possible, but unlikely, since the server doesn’t know either when the track changes. That is internal business of Roon.
Check that you are running the official lowlatency kernel, or the custom one from me. Not the one titled “generic”.
But this is something Roon people should rather look into. To me, this kind of thing is just a black box.
I installed the official low latency kernel this morning and the good news is that the situation is much improved. All the local content examples now play without breaks. From Qobuz, I think about 9 out of 10 examples now play cleanly that didn’t before. Strangely, I have 24/192 examples that are now OK and a 16/44 version that is not! With the few examples left that play with breaks, the gap is noticeably shorter than it was.
So, thank you for the great advice that has more or less fixed what was a minor issue for me. HQPlayer is a great piece of software and this was my only reservation. I’ll look at your custom kernel when I have time. For now, back to music but no more Alpine Symphonies for a while!!!
I’m very happy about your success
But it’s a pity that my problem still doesn’t solved…
Probably the developer doesn’t have time to deal with it (192/24 albums gappless) - so maybe you have any idea?
I tested this on my configuration, completely different from yours, and gapless is working fine, both HQPlayer in Album mode, and Roon-HQPlayerEmbedded.
The albums I tested are:
Pink Floyd DSOTM streaming from Qobuz 192kHz/24bit - Qobuz streaming
But again, I am running on completely different hardware than you. I’m just trying to help you to explore possible causes of your problem.
Have you tried with the lightest filters/modulators to see if CPU-load would play a role. It should not, but better to test it (if not already done).
For completeness, here is my whole configuration: Description My Setup
Details on your Core machine (OS, Hardware specs, Roon build)
Audiolinux Server, running on Audiolinux V3, Intel i9 13900 processor, 32GB RAM, 1 HD Samsung SSD 512GB for OS+apps Roon/HQPlayerEmbedded + 2 HD Samsung 4TB SSD for local music
Roon version 2.0 build 1353
HQPlayer: HQPlayer Embedded 5.2.0
Details on your Remote(s) (OS, Hardware specs, Roon build)
iPad Air Pro – 128GB - running iPadOS 17.1.1 - Roon version 2.0.1352
Samsung S23 – running Android version 13 – Roon version 2.0.1352 ‑ Wifi 6
Laptop running Windows 11 Home - 11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz 2.80 GHz Ram 16GB, Roon version 2.0.1353
Networking details (especially what hardware you’re using, how everything is connected, and anything notable about how it’s all configured)
Ethernet & Wifi Mesh network built on 4 * Asus Zenwifi XT8
Thank you - I tried with these settings but unfortunately it still doesn’t work.
I remind that this is about a standalone HQP embedded (RPi4).
Because Roon can handle 192/24 albums without any problems - even with HQP as an endpoint.
First, when playing with HQPlayer Client, check that in HQPlayer Client you have “Prefetch” enabled. Then try with both “Freewheel” enabled and disabled.
When the stream is coming from Roon, HQPlayer doesn’t even know where the track changes since there’s just a single endless stream. So the hiccup is more likely Roon not being able to prefetch the next track data quickly enough. What kind of internet connection do you have?
