Dropouts

[Albufeira]

Hello to everyone.

I am new to the forum and hope for your help.
For me, the Minimserver (and also the Synology media server) runs on a Synology DS216. Streaming FLAC and Wave files, whether 44 or 96kHz, 16 or 24 bit works without restriction. The network (router, 3 switches, WLAN access point) about 15 devices in the LAN, various devices in the WLAN for a single family house may already be quite extensive.

What does not work?
Unfortunately, I hear short dropouts while playing MP3, FLAC or Wave files that were previously converted to 24bit with Acourate convolution files. Interestingly, the dropouts begin about 30 seconds after the song has started.

What have I done so far?
Minimserver, Minimstreamer and ffmpeg uninstalled and reinstalled.
In the second step, turn off everything and turn on again in the order: Router (then wait 5 minutes), the switch on the Synology DS216 (then wait 3 minutes), then the NAS (then wait 5 minutes), then the Cambridge Audio Streamer.
Even the replacement of the LAN cable between Switch and Synology did not work.
Although I have built the above network myself, I call myself not as a computer geek and am really overwhelmed with my knowledge in the clarification of the described facts.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Would be very grateful.

[simoncn]

Try opening Synology Resource Monitor and watching the CPU usage as you play a song. Does it hit 100% or get close to 100% when the dropouts occur?

[Snoopy08]

The DS216 has a Marvell Armada 385 88F6820 Dual Core CPU. Would be struggling to do convolution. If you want to do convolution, suggest an Intel box, may be able to get away with an older core.

[Albufeira]

(21-06-2019 07:31)simoncn Wrote:  Try opening Synology Resource Monitor and watching the CPU usage as you play a song. Does it hit 100% or get close to 100% when the dropouts occur?

Thank you for response. The CPU is under 15%.

[simoncn]

Thanks for confirming this. In this case, the problem must be somewhere in your network.

You could set up a test network with a minimum number of devices needed to play music. This might be just the router, the NAS, the streamer and possibly your WLAN access point to connect to your control point, with all these devices connected using Ethernet cables. When I have done similar testing, I have used a long Ethernet cable (15m) to connect devices in different rooms.

If you can play music using the test network without dropouts, you can then connect your other network devices one by one until the dropouts start to occur.

An alternative way of doing this test is to start with your full network and remove network devices until the dropouts no longer occur.

[Albufeira]

(26-06-2019 16:56)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for confirming this. In this case, the problem must be somewhere in your network.

You could set up a test network with a minimum number of devices needed to play music. This might be just the router, the NAS, the streamer and possibly your WLAN access point to connect to your control point, with all these devices connected using Ethernet cables. When I have done similar testing, I have used a long Ethernet cable (15m) to connect devices in different rooms.

If you can play music using the test network without dropouts, you can then connect your other network devices one by one until the dropouts start to occur.

An alternative way of doing this test is to start with your full network and remove network devices until the dropouts no longer occur.

Exactly the minimal network I have set up. Router, the NAS, the streamer and the PC. All connected to all these devices via Ethernet cable (Cat.6). The cables were relatively short. Nevertheless, the first interludes occurred after exactly 30 seconds. I broke off the test completely at a loss.

[simoncn]

What settings do you have for the stream.options property? If you remove these settings, does the problem still occur?

[Albufeira]

(26-06-2019 17:29)simoncn Wrote:  What settings do you have for the stream.options property? If you remove these settings, does the problem still occur?

No, it doesn't. The problem is only when I play convolution files.

[simoncn]

I think we are getting closer to the cause of the problem. What settings do you have for the stream.options property?

[Albufeira]

(26-06-2019 21:47)simoncn Wrote:  I think we are getting closer to the cause of the problem. What settings do you have for the stream.options property?

I hope so, too. Here are my settings:
stream.converter
/volume1/@appstore/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg
stream.options
convOut=-i /volume1/music/Convolution/Cor1S*.wav -lavfi "apad=pad_len=32768,afir=gtype=gn,atrim=start_sample=32768"
stream.transcode
flac:wav24; ,wav:wav24; ,mp3:wav24;

Do you see any problems?