I’m loving Symfonium, it’s all I ever wanted to play my library.
There is one thing though that doesn’t work well, and I suspect the problem is with the app, not the TV.
Whenever I’m listening go FLAC tracks and start a chromecast session to my TV, the TV shows a Fullscreen Symfonium logo, then the playback UI with the album art and playback position as 0:00, a spinner spins very briefly and then it kinda crashes because I’m brought back to the Google TV home screen.
This happens both when the FLAC file is streamed from my local media server (Navidrome), but also for local files, downloaded to my phone’s internal storage.
I have temporarily installed another casting app for Android and it cast a FLAC from internal storage just fine to the same TV, so I suspect the issue is on the app side.
When this happens the cast icon also turns red with an exclamation mark.
As a workaround:
Use another app just for casting (nobody wants that!)
Enable transcoding for the cast device, which pulls my pre-transcoded opus 128K collection, which then works fine. But I’d rather cast lossless of course.
I’m using 14.1.0
Thanks!
Device type
Phone
Media provider
Local device
Steps to reproduce
Start playback of a FLAC file (happened with 24bit/96kHz but also 16/44, e.g. Dani California by The R.H.C.P.)
Start casting to a Google tv (I have a TCL one, FWIW)
Wait for cast UI to appear on TV and prepare to hear some sound from the TV
Nothing plays and cast session ends. TV goes back to home screen, symfonium shows an exclamation mark on the cast icon which now turned red
Additional information
Another casting app cast the same files without issues (same conditions, local device storage, same bitrate).
I have shared logs via the in-app share feature, when prompted I entered “andreaippo” as identifier for them.
As the duplicated issues this is a bug on the Google code side on the TV that happens on some OEM devices. Symfonium use the default Google code as the receiver.
The usual fix is to uninstall the latest patches on the Cast / Chromecast package on the TV.
On the Sony TV, which is older, there was an update installed. I removed it and it works now.
The problem with this is that it’s a workaround. Newer TVs will probably ship with recent firmware including the latest Google Cast app/package, so what’s the solution for that case?
This is something for Google to fix, the FLAC file is sent untouched to Google code that then crash in their native code. (You can check a bug report /log cat on the device to see).
There’s not much workaround I can do on my side that would still use to to date secure Google code without transcoding to something else.
I’m having the same casting instability issue with a Chromecast with Google TV (2020 version), both with the current version of Google Cast (3.72.446070) and after uninstalling the updates and using the factory version.
However, the problem seems to be very specific: it only occurs when the music source is Google Drive.
I have my music library on Google Drive synced with Symfonium. When I cast a track from this library, it starts playing normally on the Chromecast. Meanwhile, Symfonium shows the track information as:
Flac · 16/44 · 922 kb/s
The problem occurs when I skip to the next track, either within an album or a playlist. At that point, the player on the Chromecast freezes and closes. In Symfonium, when this happens, the track information changes to:
Flac → Flac · 16/44 · 988 kb/s
If I disable Cast and play that same track normally on my smartphone, the information goes back to:
Flac · 16/44 · 988 kb/s
After that, I can cast the track again and it plays normally on the Chromecast.
In short, it seems there is some kind of problem processing tracks when the source is Google Drive, and it only occurs when I move from the first track to the next one.
Another important detail: casting works normally when I play these same tracks from the same Google Drive library through the Plex library in Symfonium. In this case, the Plex server is running on my computer and accesses the Google Drive library through rclone. I am still using Symfonium to play and cast the tracks; the only difference is that the music source is the Plex library instead of the Google Drive library directly.