Open Beta Testing of new TIDAL and QOBUZ implementation, feedback wanted

[oisteink]

I’m still having the skip issue after pause. Am I the only one experiencing this?
Put song on pause; wait 20min+; press play - song continues for some time (20-30 sec?) then it skips to next song in the queue.

Edit: Also what DBMandrake said - the new listings are much better

[DBMandrake]

@oisteink

I’m still having the skip issue after pause. Am I the only one experiencing this?
Put song on pause; wait 20min+; press play - song continues for some time (20-30 sec?) then it skips to next song in the queue.

Yes this happens to me as well, thanks for reminding me as I had forgotten about this bug, however I’d like to point out that this problem has actually been there from the very beginning of My Volumio even with the old Tidal and Qobuz implementation - it’s not a new bug.

I don’t know for certain the cause but I have a reasonable idea of what it probably is. As far as I know, when a Tidal/Qobuz client requests a song for playback the server gives the client a unique URL for that song for that user for that particular play of the song.

In other words the URL’s for the actual song data are generated on the fly and are unique to the user requesting to play them and they time out after a certain period of time, presumably the playback time of the song plus a bit.

This would be to avoid having static URL’s for songs which could be discovered and then shared online facilitating piracy. (As they’re just unprotected flac files without DRM…) If the URL’s time out soon after the playback time of the song they can’t be shared online as they will be expired by the time others found them.

So what is probably happening is that when you pause the song the playback client (mpd ?) is not buffering ahead to the end of the song, but only part of the song. During the 20 minutes the song was paused the transient URL for the song expires at the Tidal/Qobuz server so when you resume playback it can only play what it had left in the buffer and then playback ends prematurely because the URL is no longer valid, so the remainder of the song cannot be streamed.

Probably the only easy solution for this would be to have the playback client continue to keep streaming and buffering the song in the background when paused until the end of the song is reached, so that the entire song is buffered in memory or on disk before the URL expires.

This would be easy for regular 3-8 minute songs but might be problematic in terms of buffer space for very long songs (Progressive rock with 20-30 minute long tracks at 192/24 ) unless disk cache was used as well.

Hopefully the devs can come up with a good solution for this problem.

[Rerun]

another, more complex option, that requires some knowledge about the lifetime of the generated URL. Either its time-of-life can be discovered through the API or the documentation or is just guessed like length-of-song*(fix value).

• when the user presses pause, a counter starts

• when play is pressed, the system calculates if the URL is still valid

• if true, the song continues to play

• if false, a dialog appears “Do you want to start the song from the beginning or skip to the next song” Button 1 “Start from beginning of song”
  Button 2 “Skip to next song”

[volumio]

Thanks DbMandrake, this is exactly what happens.
Fixing this bug is on our todo list and we will do like that :

• When we pause, we will store the expiration time
• if resumed and expiration time is passed, we will request another stream url and seek to current position

It will take some time to do though, so it won’t happen in this release

[DBMandrake]

@volumio

Thanks DbMandrake, this is exactly what happens.
Fixing this bug is on our todo list and we will do like that :

• When we pause, we will store the expiration time
• if resumed and expiration time is passed, we will request another stream url and seek to current position

Glad the issue is on the radar.

This sounds like a better solution than a huge buffer.

[Nessuno]

Problème lecture volumio via qobuz?

Not a word from developers after 20 days… My yearly virtuoso account expires by november 25th and of course I’m going to cancel my subscription if I still cannot properly use what I payed for. By the way: after a little time on Google I found that the issue is well known and documented and is caused by a misbehavior of MPD in addressing multiple requests to Qobuz and Tidal servers for tracks longer than its local buffer. The issue has been verified and tentatively solved by MPD and umpmdpcli d…

[Lintbf]

V 2.846 tidal, my Playlist : I can sort the Playlist by date or a-z… But in qobuz I do not have this feature. I realy Like this feature
This will be imolemented?
Thanks

[martinwtaylor]

Thank you for fixing the London Grammar and other albums issue.

Also albums by The Knife search and play properly.

[volumio]

@Lintbf

V 2.846 tidal, my Playlist : I can sort the Playlist by date or a-z… But in qobuz I do not have this feature. I realy Like this feature
This will be imolemented?

We will, but after we release this. thanks for suggesting!

[DBMandrake]

@DBMandrake

@volumio

Thanks for the reports! The last issue about the playlist has been just solved. As DBMandrake suggested it was about clicking on the play icon near the tracks.

I’ve just updated to 2.852 and while clicking on the play button to the left of tracks in Tidal now does something it still doesn’t work properly.

The way I would expect it to behave is that it would only add the song clicked on to the playback queue.

But instead it clears the queue, adds all songs from the tracks section of Tidal to the playback queue (which takes about 20 seconds as there are hundreds of songs in my tracks list in Tidal) and then starts playback not of the song I selected, but the one after it.

On the other hand clicking the 3 dot icon to the right of a song in tracks and choosing play clears the playback queue, queues only the selected song and begins playback, and does this very quickly. This is what I would expect the play icon beside a song to do.

I’ve just discovered the setting “Playback Mode: Single/Continuous” in Playback options which was set on continuous. I don’t remember seeing this setting before so I assume it’s new?

Anyway, if I set it to Single then click on a song in Tidal Tracks only the one song is queued for playback and it is the correct song.

However in Continuous mode all tracks are added to the queue (which matches the description of the setting) but the song which begins playing is the one after the one selected.

[volumio]

@DBMandrake

I’ve just discovered the setting “Playback Mode: Single/Continuous” in Playback options which was set on continuous. I don’t remember seeing this setting before so I assume it’s new?

Yes, what you want is to set playback mode to single
Since 2 months we made continuous as the default method.

We are checking on the track number

[volumio]

Good news. In the last 2 days we performed several tweaks and fixes to the cloud browsing instance. It seems we figured out some inconsistencies.
We will monitor how it goes over the weekend and if all ok next week we will finally release.

So, keep on testing and reporting. Your help has helped tremendously, thanks so much to everyone who participated !!!

[Lintbf]

Hello,
Please give me your opinion : go with tidal and an mqa dac (Zen ifi) or qobuz and topping e30.
Thanks
I am a little bit confused…

[volumio]

The Zen Ifi will not decode MQA with Volumio (as it requires first stage unfolding)…
Did not hear none of those…

[DBMandrake]

@volumio

@DBMandrake

I’ve just discovered the setting “Playback Mode: Single/Continuous” in Playback options which was set on continuous. I don’t remember seeing this setting before so I assume it’s new?

Yes, what you want is to set playback mode to single
Since 2 months we made continuous as the default method.

Ah so the setting was always there but defaulted to Single before ? I just don’t remember noticing it before.

However I did do a format and fresh install just under two months ago when Tidal/Qobuz support stopped working completely for me, so I guess the fresh install picked up the new default at that time.

[DBMandrake]

@volumio

The Zen Ifi will not decode MQA with Volumio (as it requires first stage unfolding)…
Did not hear none of those…

Can you clarify some points regarding MQA support ?

If My Volumio doesn’t support first stage unfolding what is the difference between the MQA switch being enabled or disabled ? Does disabling the MQA switch request a “non MQA” 16 bit 44.1Khz fall back version of the song from Tidal when you choose an MQA track/album ?

Is there any difference or advantage (disadvantage ?) to enable MQA on a DAC like mine which does not support MQA if there is no first stage unfolding in Volumio ?

Are there any plans to add first stage unfolding in the future ?

Also how does this relate to the sound quality setting drop down - does it have to be set to “Highest Possible” to enable MQA and would setting it to Hi-Res always result in the regular 16 bit 44.1Khz flac files ?

Even Tidal themselves are not clear on some of the nuances here around MQA.

[DBMandrake]

Weird problem, not sure how I triggered it…

Clearing the playback queue and adding the song again restored normality…

Edit: I can reproduce the problem. I am adding individual tracks to the playback queue from Qobuz “Tracks”, if I pause the playing song then resume the song/artist/album name changes to a URL like this…

[balbuze]

Yes I saw this, but It seems to not happen with v2.852 and experimental cloud.

[DBMandrake]

I am using 2.852 on experimental cloud too.

I see it on both Tidal and Qobuz but not local media.

I had a hunch that it might be related to playback mode Single/Continous which is the only setting I have changed recently. So I changed it back to Continuous and the problem is gone.

However - I then changed it back to Single and the problem is still gone!

So this bug seems to be related to the Playback mode, but I haven’t yet found how to trigger it again after changing it back to single. Maybe related to the off by one track error ?

If I figure out how to reproduce it again I will post back.

[windplr]

I’m in a situation where I’m trying to play Qobuz tracks and nothing playing. Here is a link to the log:
http://logs.volumio.org/volumio/8wDojmD.html

I’m on the latest dev version 2.852. This is happening regularly, and doesn’t seem to be only on Qobuz playback, also seen it on TIDAL.

Then, miraculously, after another minute or so of waiting I tried again and it is playing. Here is the log of it working.

http://logs.volumio.org/volumio/kkactnI.html

I see instances of these errors in the logs:

error: updateQueue error: null
and
bcm2835-i2s 3f203000.i2s: I2S SYNC error!