Performance

[impeth]

Hello,

I have experienced the following during my first days of use with RuneAudio v0.2 on Rasperry Pi B:

1. When decoding files (e.g. FLAC) RuneAudio may experience some degradation to performance (pops, clicks, jumbs etc.)
2. The same files having been decoded in advanced to an uncompressed format (e.g. WAV or AIFF) do NOT have the same issues, they are being played back normally.
3. Intervention from RuneUI affects playback quality some times: Skipping track, creating list, making minor configuration changes and touching RuneUI in general, MAY affect RuneAudio playback performance (pops, clicks, jumbs etc.). I think it should be run in a lower priority mode. If you start playback of uncompressed 16/44 files and never touch the UI, you should normally experience no problem.
4. USB output (e.g. to a USB DAC) runs with less problem issues, it is generally better both in sound quality and in flawless performance.

Despite the above issues (which I think are because of the early adoption) I want to note that sound quality (especially of the RuneAudio kernel) is FANTASTIC and is compared to expensive hardware/software combinations.

I think that Rasperry Pi with RuneAudio is the cheapest high end audio transport!!!

Please make your best to solve the remaining performance issues. I hope in v0.3 at least some of them will be solved.

Many Thanks!

[ACX]

Hi impeth, I'm glad that you appreciate our work

Do the points 1-3 refer to analog output? We had to put a "dirty fix" on that via UI because it's still buggy when skipping tracks, we count to completely fix it in the next release. USB output does not suffer to any of those troubles, at least to my knowledge.

About RuneUI, the next version will have a dramatically lower impact on the system and also on the clients. We are doing a huge backend and frontend rework, in which we already achieved big improvements in performance and usability.

[impeth]

Hello ACX,

Points 1 to 3 are also valid for USB output when playback encoded (e.g. FLAC) files.
The same file played decoded (I have tried AIFF) has no issues
I do appreciate your work a lot & wait for the next release!!!

Thank you...

[ACX]

That would suggest a load problem (an encoded file takes more CPU resources than an unencoded one), but the average load on the system is very low, even when playing FLAC files. Moreover, I expect the playback of a uncompressed (and bigger) file to be more problematic than a compressed one on the Raspberry Pi when played from a NAS, because of its shared USB/Eth bus bandwidth limits. Are you playing from a network mount?
I have to ask you more information, can you please submit a detailed debug report ?

[impeth]

[wcsuther]

I too am having occasional "clicks" with playback of ALAC files. It's not unuseable, but a bit annoying. I am coming from having used Logitech Squeezebox software on my pi, where I rarely, if ever had that problem. I tried overclocking my pi...it may have helped slightly..? I'm assuming this is just early stages of rune stuff, and it is much less frequesnt than it was on Volumio. If I can help by sending logs or whatever, I would be happy to.

Thanks for the work on this!

-Craig

[wcsuther]

I should have mentioned that I am using USB (DAC) audio out. I have no problems with lower bit rate files.

-Craig

[wcsuther]

I have fixed my performance issues with this added to /boot/cmdline.text parameters: dwc_otg.fiq_split_enable=0

[impeth]

Hello Craig,

Can you please explain us what is this parameter for?

[wcsuther]

I believe it forces the USB into 1.1 as described here: This was a copy and paste fix on my part..I'm not too fluent with linux, etc.

-Craig