Volumio Version: 2.861
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 B+
DAC: Allo DigiOne
Ever since upgrading to 2.861, I’ve had quirks with Qobuz, my primary music source for Volumio. The first and most visible issue is the load times for an initial track, as well as gaps between subsequent tracks. These can be lengthy, say 10 to 15 seconds easy, although the gaps are not consistent. Prior to installing 2.861, Qobuz tracks loaded quickly, and there were virtually no gaps between tracks. I understand the interaction with Qobuz changed significantly with 2.861, and this appears to be one negative side effect.
Also, Volumio simply skips over tracks in my Qobuz playlists. I can’t see any rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes it skips more than half of the tracks on a playlist, though.
In desperation, I performed a factory reset - and unfortunately, it made no difference. Performance with Qobuz is unacceptable. It skips many songs for no reason, and the lag in loading is far beyond anything I saw with previous versions. Is it possible to downgrade to 2.799, or at least a version where the Qobuz integration changes were optional?
I was able to locate the image for Volumio 2.834, and so reverted back to that version. The behavior with Qobuz is much improved, especially the track skipping. The lagginess in playback of the first track and subsequent tracks seems like more than what I remembered from past experience with this version of Volumio, so either I was perceiving the change as greater than it actually was, or possibly Qobuz has changed the streaming behavior in some way, although this seems less likely. Still, I think the playback performance is more consistent, with delays of 3-5 seconds between tracks instead of the 10-15 seconds I seemed to experience with 2.861.
I am curious to know why it seems no one else has reported these issues - whether other Qobuz users simply aren’t experiencing them, or whether there just aren’t that many who stream Qobuz through Volumio, so that I represent a small part of the Volumio user community? Personally, I found these problems deeply disappointing, and I will be hesitant to upgrade to a newer version of Volumio if no revision to Qobuz behavior is referenced in the changelog.
I am also disappointed that no one representing Volumio reached out to assist or find out more information. I am a paying Virtuoso customer, and while this doesn’t entitle me to VIP treatment, receiving no response at all strikes an off note.
Hi Aylarja,
you indeed have a sort of “VIP” treatment since you are a virtuoso user you are entitled to receive priority dedicated support via mail. For future issues you can refer to techsupport at volumio dot org
Regarding your issues, we are checking as we speak on our systems to see if something is degrading performances.
The track skipping issue is something we are investigating as well, it would be useful to know from where you are from to better diagnose this.
Then, for the loading times, this looks to me somethign related to your connection, do you have some hints on that? The loading time is related to internet connection speed and maybe there is something eating your bandwith.
We will get back to you with some further questions if needed, we’re on top of it
@volumio, Thank you for the clarification on VIP support. I hadn’t realized that was available, so good to know for the future.
I am located in the San Francisco Bay Area of the US, if that is specific enough? If you need more specificity, please let me know.
My network connection is gigabit via cable, so actual speeds can vary. But even when it dips, it’s still a pretty large pipe. My Volumio is hardwired, but maybe there is an issue affecting this leg of my home network - although I haven’t noticed issues with other devices sharing that same leg. Is there a way to log performance that might shed more light?
The loading times under 2.861 seemed much less consistent, and were typically more laggy than what I saw previously, or even now under 2.834. Granted, I didn’t take actual time measurements, so this is based on impressions. I wonder if one possibility is that, since 2.861 was skipping tracks, much of the lag I was seeing was some processing related to the tracks it didn’t play? Just a thought.
Please let me know if you have further questions, or if there is a way that we can capture data that would help make things clearer. Thanks.
from an internal analysis it seems that the issue is due to Qobuz failing to provide information about the track you saved. We are working on this issue to find a solution.
Are you experiencing any kind of performance issues?
@fanciulli, most typically I play an album from Qobuz, and so I can confirm I have the issue there. I will need to try a Qobuz playlist to see if it behaves any differently. Browsing Qobuz menus seems to be slower than it used to be - while using 2.861, I could watch the color progress bar work its way across the screen and take some time. If it was only that, I would live with it - it wasn’t that bad. But I do think 2.861 took longer to pull up content from Qobuz.
this morning i deployed an update on the cloud that speeds up the streaming of songs. You should see the latency between click and playback to be reduced. Hope you see some progress on this.
@fanciulli, thanks for this feedback. Will I need to revert back to version 2.861 to see a difference? Also, does this have any effect on the skipping of songs in a playlist?
yes you need to be on the latest version. Skipping of songs is probably due to a “bad” behaviour from Qobuz. In order to analyze this and the remaining issues i need you to extract logs from your volumio.
Follow this guide to send us your logs. When uploaded please send us the link given by the web page.
In order to be effective please perform a fresh boot, perform all the actions that usually provide errors or lagginess and then send logs.
@fanciulli, I do not see a link or an attachment for the guide you referenced.
Also, a bit more detail: before I updated back to 2.861, I tried playing a Qobuz album on 2.834, and I found that it was also skipping songs. After reinstalling 2.861, from a bit of testing, I am finding that it seems to skip every other song on the album: it plays song 1, song 3, song 5, but skips song 2, song 4, etc. So, as I now reassess, this behavior seems the same in both 2.834 and 2.861, skipping every other song. Once I have a link to the guide, I will perform the test you are requesting. But my impression from simple observation is that there is not a significant performance improvement in the loading of songs in 2.861 - they still take a long time most of the time.
@fanciulli, a question that maybe I should redirect as a feature request: my guess, based on the loading behavior that I am seeing from Qobuz into Volumio, is that Volumio waits for a song to complete before it attempts to load the next song. If that is the case, would it be possible that Volumio would preload the following song based on the “Audio Buffer Size” or “Buffer Before Play” settings? In other words, if the “Audio Buffer Size” setting is 2MB, could Volumio begin downloading song 2 when song 1 has 2MB left to play? Maybe that exact formulation isn’t practical, but the idea of preloading the next song would seem to eliminate or reduce the downloading delay. Hopefully the act of downloading wouldn’t create interference for the song currently being played, of course.
regarding the preloading the Qobuz plugin is already fetching the new song few seconds before the end of the current one. Based on the real issue you’re having that may not influence the final result.