Music stops and skips while using Android Auto

Support
1

Issue description:

Using Navidrome as server. Debug logs uploaded under “wpwoodjr”.

Sometimes in the car, the song will pause, and sometimes skip to the next track. The log should show that a song initially played partway through, then skipped several songs, then played one for several seconds, then Symfonium kind of “gave up” and had nothing in the now playing screen.

Logs:

Upload description: wpwoodjr

Additional information:

 
This has happened at home too, where a song will stop in the middle and then not be playable until some time has passed. In that case Symfonium skips to the next track.

It seems like maybe the cache isn’t working properly?
 

Reproduction steps:

 
See above.
 

Media provider:

Subsonic

Screenshots:

     

2

You have not enabled playback cache in those logs.

There’s network timeouts and issues and so playback issues, just enable playback cache to mitigate.

3

I’m confused by all the cache options. How should I enable it?

4

Settings/Offline cache/Playback.

5

Thanks. A couple of questions.

  1. When setting the cache size, it suggests “See offline cache for proper offline caching”. What does that mean?

  2. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a sensible default for this setting, say 200MB or so? That would probably eliminate some support incidents!

  3. Is there an article on how to set the caches up in Symfonium?

Thanks again.

6

It means that the playback cache is not offline cache, there’s no guarantee it have everything to fully play offline things.

Symfonium is also a local player and many people only use it locally on a working wifi. There’s no need to cache on SDcard and decrease it’s life duration for no reason.

There’s docs for everything and then more Docs

7

OK, after enabling the playback cache, I am seeing the same behaviour, this time on wifi. Which is odd because the sequence of events was:

  1. Try to play album in car, it skipped
  2. At home, play on wifi no issues
  3. enable 518MB playback cache, play on wifi and it skips again at pretty much the same place as in the car on 3 songs

I’ve uploaded the log as “wpwoodjr2”

8

The logs are very hard to read you have many different providers and it’s not clear what you are doing.

Seems the issue occurs with wma files from Navidrome ? Do you have any forced transcoding server side ?

9

All the providers are filtered except Navidrome. Navidrome is transcoding WMA files to 320kbs MP3. Weird that it worked OK that one time.

10

Oh no wait, I have server transcoding turned off in Symfonium. Under the artist name in Now Playing it says:

  1. Track 1: ASF/WMA 230 kb/s 44.1 kHz
  2. Track 2: ASF/WMA > ALAC 210 kb/s 44.1 kHz
  3. Track 3: ASF/WMA 219 kb/s 44.1 kHz

Weird because I would have thought they all would say ASF/WMA > ALAC but only track 2 does.

11

It’s happening now on wifi with other WMA’s that I haven’t played before with Symfonium. Let me know if you need logs.

12

OK, definitely seems to be a WMA issue, perhaps with the ALAC transcoding Symfonium is doing? I’m not seeing issues with MP3’s. For now I can’t seem to play any WMA file all the way through. Still a mystery why it worked that one time after the car ride but before I enabled the cache. Maybe I’ll turn the cache off and see what happens on WIFI.

13

Playing some WMAs now over WIFI with no issues when play cache is disabled. When I re-enable the play cache, WMA files stop working.

14

Please provide a log where you enable playback cache. Clear it in the advanced settings. Play a WMA file. Then disable playback cache and play again the exact same file.

15

OK, log uploaded as “wpwoodjr3”. Song played was “Spirits (Volume 2) 1”. It stopped playback at about 1 minute in with cache enabled. Played all the way through with cache disabled.

16

Was able to reproduce, seems the cache have issue with wma transcoding.

The workaround is to not skip the playback cache for that special case but network issues won’t be workarounded.

17

Will you be able to fix it so I can use the playback cache? Because I was having network issues in the car, even with MP3s.

18

Don’t use WMA ? :slight_smile: Symfonium will use the cache for mp3 and not for wma.

Not much more with Navidrome until I find time to write the new transcoding specs for Open subsonic

19

So are you saying you will update Symfonium not to cache WMA? Does that include the offline cache? Why not fix the cache?

Is this issue somehow related to Navidrome? Because I have “Ignore server transcoding settings” turned on, which I think means Navidrome won’t transcode.

20

Cache code is Google code for a specific use case.

The issue is indirect to Navidrome as Subsonic transcoding API is limited.