[ThorSE]

Hi,

Upon upgrade to 16.1, I suddenly started getting very frequent "1 second dropouts" in audio playback. This never happened before and I did not change the hardware or how the system is wired up (I was sitting in another room and logged in via SSH).

Enabling the debug log and watching it with tail -f always showed the following line when the dropouts occurred:

CAESinkALSA - snd_pcm_writei(-32) Broken pipe - trying to recover

There is a lot of information about this in various posts (like turning off passthrough) but none of this helped. After reading through the settings for advancedsettings.xml, I tried two things at once...

<buffermode>1</buffermode>
<cachemembuffersize>157286400</cachemembuffersize>

After reboot, the system has not missed a beat!

These settings should be for the video buffers but I could not find anything for the audio buffers
First setting buffers all file systems (local and remote).
The second is the amount of RAM to use for a buffer. I have 8 GB of RAM so I just chose a big number.

Note: I am running everything from a local solid state drive (not streaming over the network).

Hope this helps somebody else who has the same irritating problem...

[fritsch]

No Debug Log - no problem, please ...

[ThorSE]

Fritsch: I am new here and really only joined to add a solution to help others - not to ask for help. I therefore wonder why I should post a whole debug log when I am posting a solution (and actually posted the relevant line from the debug log).

[fritsch]

What you provided is no solution as the single line shows a driver error of a sound device going away ... to really solve the issue a Debug Log is needed. The one line sadly is not enough ... your solution of caching every single file with up to 150 MB only helps by accident. I am quite sure that it will fail again next time you test another file.

So post your Debug Log and we can find a real solution.