A little perplexed with a WiFi issue

[PanicFan]

Problem: Dropouts when playing FLACs and to a lesser degree MP3s from another computer via WiFi, but zero dropouts playing songs from web radios via WiFi.

Gear:
RPi2 with Rune audio 3.18.7-3
Panda Wireless PAU06 300Mbps N USB Adapter
Plugable USB 2.0 7-Port High Speed Hub with 15W Power Adapter
DAC IQaudIO Pi-Dac+

The Wireless adapter is plugged into the Pi, and the Pi is plugged into the power adapter. The FLAC and Mp3 files are being pulled via wifi off of a 1 TB Western digital blue Hard drive that is inside my desktop computer. The desktop is a recent build with an i5 processor and 16GB of ram running windows 10 (although i had the same issue with an older computer with much worse specs that this one replaced.

With the old computer i thought the drop outs may be related to the computer its self due to a weak processor and little memory. After building an new one with the above specs, the computer should have plenty of speed and power to serve the RPi2.

If it is my Wifi itself, why do radio streams never give me a 1-2 second drop out?

Any thoughts?

I dont know whether or not its related but every so often i have to reboot the Pi as i think the wifi is going to sleep. I wonder if i am still power starved and how to check it.

As an aside, I plan to try an external HD to the Rpi2, but it seems the power is currently limited. If i plug the USB HD into either the RPi2 or the powered hub.

[silvrr]

I would try searching for issues with your wifi adapter. The common Edimax adapter used with Pis has a sleep feature that has driven many nuts trying to figure out what is going on. Maybe try to see if you can preven the sleep/suspend mode.

Im not well versed enough in Linux to provide an actual fix, sorry.

[PeteB]

[PanicFan]

[rastus]

Do the FLAC files stutter when playing them via USB connected directly to the Pi itself?

[PanicFan]

[Dohmar]

I believe you're using high quality flacs and the latency between the source and the playback exceeds the buffer of the audio plus the bandwidth of the wireless.
I have the same problem on occasion, running from a raid5 via the pi3's onboard wlan. the max the wlan can handle is 15MB per sec, and any USB wireless device would have the same limitation. on average most FLACs ive played are 5-10MBps but 24/192 flacs are around 10-14MB per second, so depending on your FLACs, you're pushing the boundaries of the wireless.

Even when you're running under that threshold, the source might not be sending the flac or have the data queued to send, and the pi might run out of cached audio in that case.

I cant speak for your specific setup, but a pi3's wireless is barely adequate for streaming flacs to it via smb, I would recommend wired LAN for that in all cases, or preferably, a locally attached usb drive. Pi3 wireless is convenient, but not optimal. I'm building my metal pi-fi case around rj45 connections with both onboard bluetooth and wlan disabled. Right now I'm only using it because I'm still in the build phase

-D

[rastus]

Well that's what I was thinking.... your WiFi dongle, all things considered, should play 16bit 44.1kHz files, 24bit 44kHz, 24bit 48kHz, and 24bit 88kHz... but I know my WiFi dongle sometimes stutters with 24bit 96kHz and almost always stutters with 24bit 176kHz and 24bit 192kHz. If it's the Pi3 then this may be worse, they are built in and I've read about issues. I have my WiFi dongle in a powered USB hub about six inches away from the Pi 2B. Seems to work fine. Also, your WiFi dongle may be going into sleep mode, but it should not while transferring files. I disabled sleep mode anyway, just in case. If not using a USB flash drive type, but rather an external HDD (I assume attached to you powered hub), could that be the problem here? I would attached a USB flash drive to the Pi itself, to test if that works. The process of elimination... rule out what it's not, to find out what it is.

[PanicFan]

playing with my router settings, it was capping bandwidth at 145 Mbps for some reason. Increasing it to 300 Mbps seems to have done the trick. I played my flacs (all ripped from CDs so they should be 16/44. went over an hour with no stuttering / drop out. Kinda shows me it was bandwidth problem and not something on the windows machine.

I still have that question about my Rune Version and git pull. When i open up rune audio -> settings, The linux kernel i am running is "linux-arch-3.18.7-3-ARCH. Ran another gitpull and that has not changed. Am i not running the latest version of something?

here is a pastebin as well: http://pastebin.com/tEjbGqu2

Cheers and thanks for the help. i made a baby step today - but a huge one. not having stuttering redbook level Flacs is a big big bost to my blood pressure levels as i can now sit and listen to music w/o the drop outs in the middle of a guitar solo

[PeteB]