I have always wondered this myself. I think the reason is to make sure the players start to play in sync and avoid excessive re-syncing which would sound bad.
To synchronize the playback the server manages each player's latency and tells the player, where to start in the stream, the server knows how long the player needs to start the stream, each player can have a certain delay. This can actually be quite long (in iPeng, for example, the longest possible latency delay is 2s when the output route is AirPlay). After the playback has started, the only way to correct offsets is by dropping samples on the slowest player to make it catch up. This means you want the player to start not too much out of sync because in theory it could mean you have to skip several seconds of music on most of your players if one starts too far ahead. The server only knows the exact timing of the start after the fact, that is, when all players have started. All of that said: I still believe this could be done better. Latencies in networks are not as extreme as they might have been 10 years ago and the pause actually does not prevent players from starting out of sync so the massive sample dropping still happens. But one additional reason might be that not all players support re-syncing, some software players might depend on starting in sync with the rest of the group, these players might no longer correctly sync without the pause and I don't know whether LMS knows the player capabilities well enough, so many authors just declare their players as something else to enable functionality reserved for Squeezeboxes (like ad-less Pandora) these days. Having to change the sample rate or transcoding setting might also play a role because players are not required to be able to change the format within a track but it's not always needed, the stream could at least only be paused when necessary. --- learn more about iPeng, the iPhone and iPad remote for the Squeezebox and Logitech UE Smart Radio as well as iPeng Party, the free Party-App, at penguinlovesmusic.com *New: iPeng 9, the Universal App for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=107197 _______________________________________________ Squeezecenter mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/squeezecenter
