Bugzilla – Bug 5156
Synchronized players produce distorted audio when playing external streams
Last modified: 2012-02-27 17:33:29 UTC
I like to keep my players in synchronized mode. I seldom or never want to play different music at the same time.... I also like to use the players to playback live radio now and then. This works fine, until I turn on the other player which is synchronized to the first. After that audio is mangled. I use the AlienBBC for the live radio, but I have the same problem with the podcast plugin so I suspect it's not plugin related. Of course this could be fixed in some simple way (like muting all but one of the synchronized players when playing from a stream, or just ignoring the synchronization flag), and maybe that is what should be done as a first fix, BUT, synchronization is a really cool feature. It would be very nice to have it work properly also for streamed content. I also think it important that synchronization can start (when turning on one of the synchronized players) in the middle of some piece, but that's another bug (1909).
I'm not able to reproduce this. What stream(s) are you experiencing this with? I'm not able to reproduce this as you describe, nothing mangled when I power on the other (synced) player.
Sorry for the bad research. Things work fine with some streams, I tried some shoutcast streams and they work ok. Some streams that do not work are "AlienBBC - Radio 1" and "AlienBBC - Sveriges Radio - SR P1" and "Slim Devices Picks - Best of Internet Radio - Pop | Virgin Radio UK". If I turn off synchronization these streams work fine, even in both players in parallel (sounding a bit... unsynchronized then, naturally). It seems to me that what the nonworking streams have in common is that they use transcoding on the server. By the way, by "not working" I mean that there is sound for about one second, then quiet for about one second, this repeats for a while, then it goes all silent. While silent one of the players display "rebuffering", the other "paused".
I've been unable to get AlienBBC working on Ubuntu, so it's difficult for me to try those 2 streams. However I've tried a number of times now with synchronized players to see this failure when streaming the Virgin Pop stream, it just works fine here. Could it be something specific to AlienBBC?
Is bitrate limiting being used? What exact player are you using, SoftSqueeze, or which model Squeezebox?
I've just checked in a large patch to the SlimServer 7 sync code, thanks to Alan Young. Please retest this issue.
Mats if you are interested in running 7.0 the sync performance has been radically improved.
After learning that you're not able to reproduce the problem, I wanted to look more closely at it, maybe it was due to some local misconfiguration? Suddenly I was not able to reproduce it either! No idea what fixed the problem. I've been having this problem for >18 months, since I got my second squeezebox. Meanwhile I'm running version 6.5.4, possibly codecs have been upgraded too. My two players are squeezebox and squeezebox v3, not that I think it matters any more :-) Thanks.
Closing resolved bugs - if you feel this bug still exists please first re-test with the latest SW/FW version. If you are able to reproduce then feel free to reopen and attach new logs / steps to reproduce.