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FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:30 pm
by sunspot
I'm hitting kind of an odd problem. I've got MediaMonkey running on a little touchscreen notebook PC, which seems to be more than powerful enough to play files located on its internal 128GB SSD. However, I moved my library to my WD NAS, which is mapped to a drive letter on the notebook like a standard PC directory (I'm not using DLNA). The notebook sees the directory just fine and can pull files over at about 6MB/s over wifi.

However, when I try to play files from off the NAS, particularly FLACs, sometimes MediaMonkey starts stuttering and skipping. I'm assuming this is some kind of network latency maybe? Doesn't MediaMonkey pull down the whole FLAC file though when it starts to play one? Or is it pulling the file over in chunks as-needed? Seems very strange - this behavior does not happen with local files, at least that I've been able to recreate. Those play without the skipping.

Seems like if MM isn't pulling over the entire file and caching it, it should. Is there a setting for this?

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:47 pm
by Lowlander
No issues here with FLAC from NAS on a laptop. You may want to try different Output Plug-ins: http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... -corrupted

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:51 pm
by sunspot
If it was the output plugin, why doesn't the stuttering happen when playing a file off the local SSD? That seems like an input problem, not an output problem.

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 7:13 pm
by sunspot
It's happening with both the WASPI and Direct Sound output plugins, so I don't think those have anything to do with it.

The machine isn't anywhere close to being CPU, Memory or Network congested.

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 7:43 pm
by sunspot
MediaMonkey is definitely doing something over the network while it's playing FLAC files, because I see a constant draw of about .5 Mbps on the network attributed to MM.

The stuttering has stopped again, for now. I noticed Windows Defender using quite a bit of network bandwidth, so I told it to exclude scanning files from the music folder on the NAS - I doubt I have any infected FLAC files... :lol:

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 8:37 pm
by sunspot
Excluding the directory and FLAC files from scans didn't seem to resolve the problem. It's still intermittently stuttering away. I'm not seeing any other process that could potentially be to blame - CPU, Memory and Network utilization all look really low. It's possible the NAS is a bit congested - my desktop machine accesses it as well, but when I shut that machine down it didn't stop the stuttering.

Is there some kind of MediaMonkey console where we can monitor what processes might be running in the background?

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 11:09 pm
by FrozenAssets
I don't know if this is the case, but if you have the MM.DB file on the NAS that could lead to performance problems. That was an issue for me when I first setup my system.

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 12:40 am
by sunspot
I do have it out on the NAS, since it's shared with my desktop PC. I can't imagine any traffic to the DB would saturate the network though (and indeed, I'm not seeing much traffic coming from the laptop acting as a server).

Hmmm...

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 8:41 pm
by VladTepes
Did you track down the culprit and resolve this? If so can you please advise for our benefit?

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Sat Sep 09, 2017 8:49 pm
by Peke
Hi,
WiFi is not recommended for server connection, try wired and also try same file copy to local hdd and play.

Do all this while creating MMW debug log and you should see where the bottleneck is, if not open support ticket and send us the log for analyze.

Re: FLACs stutter, skip when played back from NAS

Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 12:53 am
by sunspot
It was a problem with my Google Wifi router. For some reason it had slipped back from 5GH to a slower setting. I bumped it back up and so far it hasn't happened again. Very odd...