The Raspberry Pi 3

[hondagx35]

[DaverJ]

[eboxr]

Thanks all for making this possible
My RPi3 is working perfectly out of the box !
great job guys

[scan80269]

I'd like to express my appreciation for 0.4 beta. It is awesome in how well it works.

I've got a Pi3 driving a pair of KEF X300A speakers (with built-in 24/96 DAC) over USB, and I would like to report a repeatable issue. When playing high-res content, such as 24/192 or DXD (24/352.8), the playback would abruptly stop typically less than a minute into the song, then the Rune UI would display a couple of "Audio output configuration changed" toasts. The play queue would show empty, and content lists under "Network mounts" and "My Webradios" would be empty also. Once at this point, a reboot is needed to get things back to normal again.

I should mention this issue occurs specifically while streaming via the Pi3's integrated WiFi (Broadcom?) When I added an Ethernet connection between the Pi3 and my NAS (Intel D54250WYB NUC running Windows Server 2012 R2 with NFS server enabled), the problem completely disappears, so it may have to do with the Pi3 WiFi handling the incoming high bitrate audio stream. The issue occurs quickest and most readily with the highest bitrate content, i.e. DXD (24/352.8). I checked /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/hw_params during playback to confirm the X300A DAC is getting proper downsampled 24/96 content. I increased the Audio buffer size to 8192 but it wasn't enough to get the Pi3 to play through one song over WiFi.

I reproduced this issue using two identical Pi3 setups (w/ same Sandisk 16GB SD cards) running 0.4 beta, so it's not a single unit fluke. At this point I have no idea whether this issue is related to Rune OS, MPD, X300A driver in Linux kernel, or something else but since it is so highly repeatable I decided to report it. Since streaming over Ethernet is an effective workaround I'm not stuck.

[PeteB]

[scan80269]

Here's an example of a high bitrate FLAC that does not play over Pi3 WiFi:

01 Ubi Caritas.flac
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec
File size : 324 MiB
Duration : 4mn 16s
Overall bit rate mode: Variable
Overall bit rate: 10553 Kbps
Album : Piano Improvisations
Album/Performer : Ola Gjeilo

My files are in FLAC on the NAS, but I use MinimServer/MinimStreamer to decode FLAC to PCM (WAV) before streaming out, so the PCM bitstream over Ethernet or WiFi for the above file is nearly 17Mbps.

I also have a Pi2 with a HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and a N300 WiFi dongle, and high-res files like the DXD above are handled properly with no dropouts or crashes. The Pi3 integrated WiFi by comparison doesn't appear as capable.

I haven't tried disabling the Pi3 WiFi and plugging in that N300 dongle yet, but I suppose that should be my next step.

[PeteB]

I would use iperf, and compare the results between your Pi2 with the N300 dongle to the Pi3 with its built-in WiFi.

[scan80269]

Just tried the N300 WiFi dongle replacing the Pi3 WiFi, and DXD streaming works with no issues.

I also have a Wi-Pi N150 dongle that I should also try to see how it fares.

[scan80269]

The Wi-Pi N150 dongle also works fine for DXD streaming. No crash or hiccups.

It looks like my issue is specific to the Pi3 WiFi.

[PeteB]

Without measuring the actual WiFi speed, as well as packets dropped etc, it may be difficult to diagnose the problem. Maybe this thread on the Raspberry Forum will help: