Amazon Music playback droputs

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 17, 2019 at 6:55 PM

I am using the Amazon Music add-on and I am getting very short playback dropouts (~0.1 seconds) every few seconds (sometimes after every 10s, sometimes only after every minute or so). My Raspberry Pi with LibreElec 9 is connected to the network/internet over WiFi. With the Amazon VOD add-on I have no playback issues whatsoever, not even with 720p material, not even with the audio channels. So I suppose there is no physical bandwith issue nor a problem with DRM processing performance.

I had the same (AFAIK) dropouts when playing mp3's from my local network media server. But then I created advancedsettings.xml with the following content:

Code

<advancedsettings>
    <cache>
        <buffermode>1</buffermode>
        <memorysize>20971520</memorysize>
        <readfactor>10</readfactor>
    </cache>
</advancedsettings>

After that the stutter went away completely at least with music from my local network. But the problem with Amazon Music remained.

It sounds exactly the same as with the local audio before. So my best guess is that Amazon Music add-on is probably just ignoring the above buffer settings. Don't know if this is possible.

Any ideas on how to solve it or how to diagnose?

Thanks in advance.

**blueribb** · February 17, 2019 at 8:33 PM

I don't know if this is related but I have an Echo Dot connected to my Pioneer AVR. I can ask Alexa to play songs, artists or even radio stations with my Amazon Prime account. I also have occasional short dropouts.

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 17, 2019 at 8:48 PM

Thanks for this info, blueribb. Interesting to know that it occurs even with Amazon's hardware. That brings me to the idea of checking it with my Fire TV stick in the other room... I believe I have used it only for videos yet (but with them it worked fine).

I will report... but I'll have to wait until my wife is not sleeping there...

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 21, 2019 at 3:03 PM

Luckily my Fire TV Stick has no hickup problem whatsoever. It is a Raspberry Pi exclusive problem.

But I have discovered that the gaps often occur less frequently after I have restarted the WiFi at my router, which causes it to switch channels (presumably to less crowded ones?). So it seems somehow WiFi related and not related to the Raspberry Pi having insufficient performance.

But the big question is: how can there be any playback gaps when the buffer is (now even) 40 Megs big which is enough to load even pretty epic songs into memory in one go. Doesn't this mean that the buffers are not used by the Add-On at all?

Can the plugins' source code be inspected to see if it uses an audio or network buffer?

redger · December 19, 2019 at 5:07 AM

For those coming to this thread via search,

I experienced similar problems with internet radio and was able to address them by reducing the readfactor down to 4 (default), or you could try a lower factor eg. 3

It appears that some sources are unable to fill the buffer fast enough (?)