[gustavog]

Hi, I am experiencing dropouts in the first ten seconds of track 1 (Future Times Rejoice) of the Yes Tormato FLAC 24/96 album from hdtracks. The dropouts happen everytime after powering up the BDP-1. If I skip back to the beginning of the song it plays fine. If I play the same track with Winamp on my PC it plays just fine, always.

I have experienced similar problems but that is after pausing the BDP-1 for a long time but never like this. I can send the track file for review if necessary.

Thanks.

[BSMSPEMBA]

Hi, I am experiencing dropouts in the first ten seconds of track 1 (Future Times Rejoice) of the Yes Tormato FLAC 24/96 album from hdtracks. The dropouts happen everytime after powering up the BDP-1. If I skip back to the beginning of the song it plays fine. If I play the same track with Winamp on my PC it plays just fine, always.

I have experienced similar problems but that is after pausing the BDP-1 for a long time but never like this. I can send the track file for review if necessary.

Thanks.

I experience the same drop out every time I load a new set of songs.  It is always on the first song in the playlist.  Like you, if I skip back, it plays fine.  It is not specific to any given track. 

I have always assumed it the way that DBP loads the song into cache that causes the skip.  My theory is that the player is setup to start the track immediately without delay.  However, the system is supposed to read, cache, then play the tack.  Therefore, when it switches from attached storage to cache, one gets the skip.  If my theory is correct, I would love it if future firmware would change the way this works.  I would much rather have a 1 second delay from when I hit play to go straight to the cache versus having the skip.  It is pretty annoying.

[Ned F. Kuehn]

Another possibility is that this may be hard drive controller issue (latency at the SATA interface? and independent of the cache on the hard drive). I experienced this multiple times with a prior 2 TB Seagate Barracuda XT hard drive in a Sans Digital hard drive enclosure. I recently purchased the Lacie Blade Runner 4TB hard drive and this problem seems to have disappeared (no change in firmware until today when I realized I was a few upgrades behind). Both drives formatted NTFS.

PS: The Lacie Blade Runner is built like a tank, weighs in at around 2kg (4.5lb), has no fans, runs cool due to the fins surrounding the uniquely sculpted hard drive enclosure, and is extraordinarily quiet (though not inexpensive). I have it in my equipment rack and cannot hear a sound from it when listening to the BDP-1.

[gustavog]

I experience the same drop out every time I load a new set of songs.  It is always on the first song in the playlist.  Like you, if I skip back, it plays fine.  It is not specific to any given track. 

I have always assumed it the way that DBP loads the song into cache that causes the skip.  My theory is that the player is setup to start the track immediately without delay.  However, the system is supposed to read, cache, then play the tack.  Therefore, when it switches from attached storage to cache, one gets the skip.  If my theory is correct, I would love it if future firmware would change the way this works.  I would much rather have a 1 second delay from when I hit play to go straight to the cache versus having the skip.  It is pretty annoying.

In my case I only experience dropouts with this particular album but most definitely get one when the player has been paused for a long time and sometimes in between tracks. As you say it seems the player does not cache enough of the song. Perhaps your hard disk takes a very long time to awake from a spin down and that is why you always have the problem, regardless? Not sure why I always have it with this Yes album. In any case I would like Chris to have a look at it and will also expect some kind of fix on a future firmware update.

[BSMSPEMBA]

Another possibility is that this may be hard drive controller issue (latency at the SATA interface? and independent of the cache on the hard drive). I experienced this multiple times with a prior 2 TB Seagate Barracuda XT hard drive in a Sans Digital hard drive enclosure. I recently purchased the Lacie Blade Runner 4TB hard drive and this problem seems to have disappeared (no change in firmware until today when I realized I was a few upgrades behind). Both drives formatted NTFS.

PS: The Lacie Blade Runner is built like a tank, weighs in at around 2kg (4.5lb), has no fans, runs cool due to the fins surrounding the uniquely sculpted hard drive enclosure, and is extraordinarily quiet (though not inexpensive). I have it in my equipment rack and cannot hear a sound from it when listening to the BDP-1.

I do not think that it is SATA related.  The same dropout occurs when first streaming music from the online radio stations.

[BSMSPEMBA]

In my case I only experience dropouts with this particular album but most definitely get one when the player has been paused for a long time and sometimes in between tracks. As you say it seems the player does not cache enough of the song. Perhaps your hard disk takes a very long time to awake from a spin down and that is why you always have the problem, regardless? Not sure why I always have it with this Yes album. In any case I would like Chris to have a look at it and will also expect some kind of fix on a future firmware update.

I agree.  It would be nice if Chris can take a look at it.

[ttsto]

I experienced this situation only once, recently, with high res material (also Yes ). BDP was just powered and was updating (U was displayed on front panel). I believe have something to do with hard drive congestion running parallel tasks (updating and reading a large file in the same time). My drive is WD Green with 5400rpm.

[unincognito]

sorry guys i have been in Montreal all last week and before that working over time to get the BOT-1 ready for the show in Montreal.  Its quite late so i will give you a bit of a break down on how music makes it from your drive and to your dec and Tuesday i will correct myself i'm sure of it 

The BDP uses two buffers, a small input buffer and an output buffer that can be as big as can be (if there is 60MB of system memory available it will grow to 60MB).  As you create your "current playlist", adding songs the BDP (MPD) is simply creating a list of files to be played.  It doesn't touch the files, it doesn't even check to see if they are even available.  Once you click play, or click a track to be played the BDP will wait until 50% of its 2024 byte input buffer is filled before it starts playing.  This usually results in about a once second delay before you here anything.  As some of you have already pointed out, it is possible for a hard drive (or any storage really) to influence this delay.  Hard drives can be (i'm not saying all hard drives) more proved to this because they generally have power saving features that cause the drive to spin down if data hasn't been accessed for a period of time.  There are other things that have also been already pointed out.  I have sometimes witnessed it to be much longer, for instance i have a two drive (striped) NAS containing two fijitsu 2TB hard drive connected to an intel atom board with gigabit ethernet.  This is the fasted NAS i have for testing with, it generally scores pretty high in the BDP's bandwidth benchmark (in the mid 60MB/s on a BDP-2); however when i go to play music form it for the first time for the day it takes about 3-4 seconds to spin the two drives back as the system was sitting idle over night.  Finally after the audio file has been readied to be sent off to the sound card it gets kept in an output buffer which generally continues to grow until the system runs  out of available memory or everything that is in the playlist has been buffered.  This ensures (or is suppose to ensure) an uninterrupted stream of audio, the only time you should experience a pause in music is when you tell the BDP to skip to another track using the next, previous or just clicking another track.  In fact in either the most recent software release (2013-01-30/31) or perhaps it was in a beta shortly afterwards we included a feature that would allow the user to select the next track in Max 2 to avoid this delay.  You shouldn't be loosing any amount of your music; ten seconds sounds like a long delay, but with a slow enough and eco friendly enough drive i suppose its possible for there to be this much of a delay.  It still shouldn't result in the loss of the first few seconds of the track.

Cheers,
Chris

I'm off to bed

[gustavog]

sorry guys i have been in Montreal all last week and before that working over time to get the BOT-1 ready for the show in Montreal.  Its quite late so i will give you a bit of a break down on how music makes it from your drive and to your dec and Tuesday i will correct myself i'm sure of it 

The BDP uses two buffers, a small input buffer and an output buffer that can be as big as can be (if there is 60MB of system memory available it will grow to 60MB).  As you create your "current playlist", adding songs the BDP (MPD) is simply creating a list of files to be played.  It doesn't touch the files, it doesn't even check to see if they are even available.  Once you click play, or click a track to be played the BDP will wait until 50% of its 2024 byte input buffer is filled before it starts playing.  This usually results in about a once second delay before you here anything.  As some of you have already pointed out, it is possible for a hard drive (or any storage really) to influence this delay.  Hard drives can be (i'm not saying all hard drives) more proved to this because they generally have power saving features that cause the drive to spin down if data hasn't been accessed for a period of time.  There are other things that have also been already pointed out.  I have sometimes witnessed it to be much longer, for instance i have a two drive (striped) NAS containing two fijitsu 2TB hard drive connected to an intel atom board with gigabit ethernet.  This is the fasted NAS i have for testing with, it generally scores pretty high in the BDP's bandwidth benchmark (in the mid 60MB/s on a BDP-2); however when i go to play music form it for the first time for the day it takes about 3-4 seconds to spin the two drives back as the system was sitting idle over night.  Finally after the audio file has been readied to be sent off to the sound card it gets kept in an output buffer which generally continues to grow until the system runs  out of available memory or everything that is in the playlist has been buffered.  This ensures (or is suppose to ensure) an uninterrupted stream of audio, the only time you should experience a pause in music is when you tell the BDP to skip to another track using the next, previous or just clicking another track.  In fact in either the most recent software release (2013-01-30/31) or perhaps it was in a beta shortly afterwards we included a feature that would allow the user to select the next track in Max 2 to avoid this delay.  You shouldn't be loosing any amount of your music; ten seconds sounds like a long delay, but with a slow enough and eco friendly enough drive i suppose its possible for there to be this much of a delay.  It still shouldn't result in the loss of the first few seconds of the track.

Cheers,
Chris

I'm off to bed

Hope you had a good night   
But, correct me if I am wrong. If the BDP-1 is buffering the first track of the playlist, it should not start playing until the minimum buffer length is read, right? So we would just get a silent pause while the hdd wakes up but no dropouts. Anyway, please update when you have gathered your thoughts 

[skunark]

i haven't experienced dropout likes this on my BDP-1.  I'm using a bus-powered western digital, my passport 2TB USB3.0 drive, no network streaming.

It would be interesting to understand which HDD folks have and for the reported HDD if other's don't have the issue.  In the past I've had issues firewire drives not wake up from sleep on a MAC, switching from a wall-wart version to bus-powered FW drive solved that issue.  I've never experienced with with USB though.

Jim

[unincognito]

I'm not trying to explain why your getting drop outs, just how it buffers the audio it's playing.  I'll have to think about the drop outs while my brain doesn't feel like its made of Swiss cheese

Cheers,
Chris

[gustavog]

I'm not trying to explain why your getting drop outs, just how it buffers the audio it's playing.  I'll have to think about the drop outs while my brain doesn't feel like its made of Swiss cheese

Cheers,
Chris

Hello Chris,

Have you found something about the dropouts? I can send the offending tracks if necessary, for you to test.

Thanks.

[setamp]

I have the same issue.  I miss the 1st few seconds of the initial song on the playlist.  My data is kept on a WD green hdd in an external enclosure powered by a linear power supply.

[unincognito]

If you open the services menu on the BDP's settings page you can track CPU and memory usage.  Memory usage on a BDP-1 will should stay around 98% and CPU usage should range between 10% to 50% depending on the resolution of the material 44k vs 192k.  Although if it was a CPU usage issue you would get drop outs throughout playback.  The other thing some might be able to try is plugging the drive into a computer and sharing the files over the network, I'd be interested in the results.

Cheers,
Chris

[gustavog]

If you open the services menu on the BDP's settings page you can track CPU and memory usage.  Memory usage on a BDP-1 will should stay around 98% and CPU usage should range between 10% to 50% depending on the resolution of the material 44k vs 192k.  Although if it was a CPU usage issue you would get drop outs throughout playback.  The other thing some might be able to try is plugging the drive into a computer and sharing the files over the network, I'd be interested in the results.

Cheers,
Chris

In my particular case:

• I only experience the dropouts at the beginning of the first track of a playlist after powering up the BDP-1 and playing the 24/96 Yes Tormato album from hdtracks. If I skip back I don't get the dropouts. All other albums play fine on the first playlist after powering up. The offending album plays fine on my computer with Winamp always.
  
• I experience dropouts when the player has been in pause mode for a long time and I resume playback.

[gustavog]

In my particular case:

• I only experience the dropouts at the beginning of the first track of a playlist after powering up the BDP-1 and playing the 24/96 Yes Tormato album from hdtracks. If I skip back I don't get the dropouts. All other albums play fine on the first playlist after powering up. The offending album plays fine on my computer with Winamp always.
  
• I experience dropouts when the player has been in pause mode for a long time and I resume playback.

Hello Chris, anything on this???

[lossless]

Add me to the list of dropouts as well.  I do not power down my BDP-1 and it will happen the next day when I go to use it.  As with others, it happens on the first track I play.  In my case, I can hear the audio for a split second, then I get silence for a second, then the sound comes back.  If I skip back it works fine.  The hard drive is a western digital my passport essential 2 tb although it also occurred with the 1 tb version of the same drive.  My BDP-1 is connected directly to a Classe SSP-800.

[BSMSPEMBA]

Add me to the list of dropouts as well.  I do not power down my BDP-1 and it will happen the next day when I go to use it.  As with others, it happens on the first track I play.  In my case, I can hear the audio for a split second, then I get silence for a second, then the sound comes back.  If I skip back it works fine.  The hard drive is a western digital my passport essential 2 tb although it also occurred with the 1 tb version of the same drive.  My BDP-1 is connected directly to a Classe SSP-800.

Great description of the issue.  First track of the day: 2 to 4 seconds of sound, silence, then sound.  When I hit back, it plays straight through.  This issue occurs regularly enough, that it got me into the habit of hitting play, waiting 3 or 4 seconds, then hitting back, to listen to the whole song uninterrupted.

I just powered up my BDP-2 to confirm it.  Like clockwork, there was sound, silence, then sound.

In my opinion, it has nothing to do with the type of drive or the track that is being played.  I experience this issue with flash drives, SSD attached via USB dongle, streaming radio, and with internal SSD inside the BDP-2.