adamdea;545715 Wrote: > I am using my Touch almost exclusively with a directly-attached USB > drive. I have a number of downloaded 24 bit files from Linn, HDtracks, > Analekta, the Classical shop etc, together with 16 bit flac downloads > and rips. Obviously I get the stuttering problem. But that is not the > end of it: I am getting fed up having to deal with a host of > interrelated problems. > 1. the Touch sometimes crashes altogether when playing 24 bit tracks, > very occasionally 16 bit flac (doesn't really seem to happen with MP3s > or WMAs). It actually turns off and reboots, rescans, sometimes tells > me it now can't see the usb drive (which probably got as upset as i did > with having its power turned off). > 2. Sometimes it just stops playing without crashing > 3. This problem seems to happen far more often when using Ipeng, but it > does happen when I am controlling the touch manually. > 3A. It also seems to happen more often if you try to change the album > while it's playing rather than stopping it, deleting the playlist and > then starting again: especially in Ipeng but manually too. > 4 The Touch seems to particularly dislike my Linn 24 bit download of > the Bach St Matthew Passion from Linn. This has 100 tracks in one album > . It is also not particularly fond of the Hyperion complete Schubert > Lieder edition in 16 bit flac which appears as one album too, even > though it consists of 37 cds and 800 odd tracks. > 5. The Touch also seems to randomly refuse to recognise the usb drive > from time to time and says it can't read it. > 6. I have noticed that using Ipeng and when accessing manually (but to > a lesser extent) it seems to hang while searching sometimes. Even with > my relatively modest 6500 tracks no search = what is the bloody point > of this thing anyway? > I have tried the very helpful procedure posted earlier and can say > that it has definitely helped to deal with the problems; but it has not > solved them. > > The whole thing is beginning to annoy me. I agree with the view > expressed that the Touch is not really up to to running as a > stand-alone player and server at present. I don't know whether this is > because it is underpowered or because the resident squeezeserver is too > buggy, but I just don't think it's quite up to the job. I am guessing > that the problem with HD files or big playlists or finding files on the > usb drive or interrupting what it's doing or even Ipeng are probably > just aspects of that problem. > > One minor aspect of this incidentally is that on many threads it seems > to me that those would are running the player in standalone and those > who are not tend to have rather different concerns and experiences, and > sometimes talk at cross purposes. > > I am having problems with my PC at present so I can't compare very > effectively running the software on a separate server. I am going to > try using the Touch with my QNAP TS-239 NAS in the hope that it will > run better that way. If not I am likely to lose patience with it, sell > my DAC, preamp and power amps, buy a Linn Magik DSI and go and bore > people on another forum.
These are telltale signs of running out of memory. When it runs out of memory it has to do something, which is usually to kill the server. If it gets really bad it can sometimes cause a full crash of the system. So the problem is to try and figure out why its running out of memory. The number one reason is that music is being played while scanning is still happening. Scanning takes up a lot of resources and doing other stuff at the same time is a bad thing to do. You seem to have that one under control, so I'll just say to make sure scanning is finished before playing any music. If thats not it then there is something else using up memory. Large cover art that has to be scaled down to display on the Touch is known to take up a lot of memory. You might want to check your cover art dimensions and make sure they are not large. (the pixel dimensions are what is important, not the file size in bytes). Another cover art issue is whether the artwork is stored as a separate image file in the album directory, or whether it stored in each flac file. There could be memory differences based on this. That 800 song album has me worried. I'm not sure any body has ever tested albums that big before. It could very easily take significantly more memory than usual for an album data structure that big. Another aspect is the playlist for that album. There is a limit of 100 songs for a playlist on the builtin server. If you have 800 songs in an album and go to play that album you then automatically get 800 songs in a playlist, given the 100 song limit, that sounds like it could be a major problem. You might want to try explicitly making a playlist with say only 50 songs out of those 800 and play that playlist rather than the whole album and see if that makes any difference. If you are up to some diagnostics it would really help if you could run some tests. These require logging into the Touch and running some programs. You do need a computer to do this, since you say your PC is not working this might be a problem right now. If you do have access to a computer for some testing this is what you shoul do: Get a "SSH" program. On windows the popular on is called PuTTY. Search for it on the web. Enable remote access on the Touch. Settings->advanced-> remote access. When you do this it will give you the IP address and passeord for logging into the Touch. In your SSH program log onto the Touch, use a username of root. Use the IP address and password from above. Once you are on the Touch type: top This will run a program that shows how much memory and CPU different processes are using. It sorts them by CPU usage. Normally when running of the builtin server there are three processes that take most of the CPU, slimserver (its the perl process), jive (the player process) and jive_alsa (the process that actually talks to the audio hardware). When I'm playing music on mine these are usually around 10% or less CPU each. The server CPU usuage can get MUCH higher during scanning. When running 24/96 files these numbers can get bigger, but usually not more than 25%. If you see numbers much larger than this there is something unusual going on. Top also gives memory utilizations but these are much harder to pin down. There is a lot of shared memory going on, where more than one process share the same memory, each process gets listed as using this memory, so it gets counted twice. The best bet is to get a baseline of what things look like when playing 16 bit 44.1 files and then try the hi res files and those humongous albums. See if the memory utilization goes way up. You can also access the log files. They are stored in /var/log. The log files usually contain all kinds of useful information about what it actually happening to the system. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=78386 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
