Jack Coates wrote:
heh... my machine is doing a lot more than yours and I never have skips. The key issue here is streaming FLAC, IMHO, exacerbated by the size of your library. My ears aren't good enough to tell the difference, so I play MP3 and a few OGGs. I wonder if you still see dropouts when transcoding? I bet that even with the increased CPU load of running the lame process, it would still come out performing better than you have now.
Well yes -- I totally agree that there's a *big* difference between streaming PCM (WAV, FLAC, Ogg and AAC) and MP3. I don't have any problem streaming MP3 either. The data rate over the LAN for MP3 is so much lower than raw PCM (320 kb/s max vs about 1411 kb/s) that the Slimserver has no trouble keeping the Squeezebox's fixed-size buffer from running completely dry in MP3 mode.
My playback skips occur only when I play a file format that has to be transcoded on the server to raw, high speed PCM. Then the fixed-size SB buffer drains much more quickly, and sometimes the Slimserver doesn't refill it before it empties completely. Then I hear a skip.
You're right, my skips *would* almost certainly go away if I transcoded everything to MP3 over the LAN. And yes, I have enough server CPU cycles to do that in real time. But that's a *kludge*, and I shouldn't have to resort to kludges. The Squeezebox is advertised as being able to stream raw PCM over a 100 Mb/s Ethernet LAN in real time, and that's just what I want it to do. All it would take is some careful attention paid to proper task/thread structuring and prioritization within the Slimserver package. I've bought three Squeezeboxes so far, and I paid a tidy sum of money for them. Why is it somehow unreasonable to expect them to perform as advertized?
--Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
