Bugzilla – Bug 5521
delay with skip fwd/back on Apple lossless files on Windows.
Last modified: 2007-09-24 12:28:51 UTC
On Windows when playing a number of Apple lossless files. If you skip fwd/back - there is a delay of a few secs before the next track starts playing. The problem is caused by Alac.exe not detecting the closing of the output pipe when skipping. Alac.exe was introduced in 6.5 but socketwrapper hid this problem by shutting down the Alac.exe process. With 6.5.4 socketwrapper is no longer used. The following is a version of alac.exe which should fix the problem. http://homepage.eircom.net/~altondsl/slim/alac.ZIP
The patched ALAC.exe has worked for two Windows users. The fix is to handle write errors (in this case "Broken pipe") which happen when a track is being skipped. This patch is applicable to OSX and Linux as well as Windows except in Windows without the error handling there is a 5 secs delay stopping ALAC whereas the patch on a Linux system reduces the delay when skipping tracks from about 0.6sec to 0.4sec. At the moment I am not sure how to commit the ALAC change to SVN as there is no source code for ALAC checked in Slimserver SVN only the ALAC.EXE.
Three users reported success with the fix. I have comnmited the updated ALAC rev 13207