Songs loading very slow from Samba share

Support
1

Issue description:

I just installed symfonium a few days ago and it is really great, I like it overall and plan to purchase it. The only issue I am having is very slow loading times. Which at some point becomes unbearable to use.

My music library is about 100 Gb in size and is located inside a home assistant server accessed directly over the samba share, in case this is relevant.

When selecting a song to play until it starts playing the loading time can take about 5-15 seconds. I looked into the settings and found the pre-cache option and hoped this would help, so that the waiting only happens for the first song but this has no effect. If a song is played until the end, then the next one will most of the time start immediately but if I want to skip a song the loading time is back. Also it has happened that the songs stop playing because of slow buffering. Weirdly enough, the loading time of a FLAC file can be faster or similar to a 128 kbps MP3.

It doesn’t seem to matter if on wifi or cellular. When outside home I access the server through Tailscale.

Although the server hardware is not very fast, I can play songs much faster when browsing from a file explorer application on my phone, so I assume it has to do with (connection) settings.

Thanks for the support.

Logs:

Upload description: jaimea

Additional information:

 

 

Reproduction steps:

 

 

Media provider:

Samba

Screenshots:

     

2

Your server is more than slow :wink:

2025-07-14 16:53:19.929 Verbose TranscoderManager  FFProbe [5155ms]: {"streams":[{"index":0,"codec_name":"mp3","codec_long_name":"unknown","codec_type":"audio","codec_tag_string":"[0][0][0][0]","codec_tag":"0x0000","sample_fmt":"s16p","sample_rate":"44100","channels":2,"channel_layout":"stereo","bits_per_sample":0,"initial_padding":0,"r_frame_rate":"0\/0","avg_frame_rate":"0\/0","time_base":"1\/14112000","start_pts":353600,"start_time":"0.025057","duration_ts":3457105920,"duration":"244.976327","bit_rate":"320000","disposition":{"default":0,"dub":0,"original":0,"comment":0,"lyrics":0,"karaoke":0,"forced":0,"hearing_impaired":0,"visual_impaired":0,"clean_effects":0,"attached_pic":0,"timed_thumbnails":0,"non_diegetic":0,"captions":0,"descriptions":0,"metadata":0,"dependent":0,"still_image":0},"tags":{"encoder":"LAME3.99r"}},{"index":1,"codec_name":"mjpeg","codec_long_name":"unknown","profile":"192","codec_type":"video","codec_tag_string":"[0][0][0][0]","codec_tag":"0x0000","width":480,"height":430,"coded_width":480,"coded_height":430,"closed_captions":0,"film_grain":0,"has_b_frames":0,"sample_aspect_ratio":"1:1","display_aspect_ratio":"48:43","pix_fmt":"yuvj420p","level":-99,"color_range":"pc","color_space":"bt470bg","chroma_location":"center","refs":1,"r_frame_rate":"90000\/1","avg_frame_rate":"0\/0","time_base":"1\/90000","start_pts":2255,"start_time":"0.025056","duration_ts":22047869,"duration":"244.976322","bits_per_raw_sample":"8","disposition":{"default":0,"dub":0,"original":0,"comment":0,"lyrics":0,"karaoke":0,"forced":0,"hearing_impaired":0,"visual_impaired":0,"clean_effects":0,"attached_pic":1,"timed_thumbnails":0,"non_diegetic":0,"captions":0,"descriptions":0,"metadata":0,"dependent":0,"still_image":0},"tags":{"title":"cover.jpg","comment":"Cover (front)"}}],"chapters":[],"format":{"filename":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:40245\/872dc3ae9c3f5d29c54fff0188ef6176\/smb%3A%2F%2F192.168.0.17%2Fshare%2FMusic%2FMarc%20Ribot%2FSilent%20Movies%20%5B2010%5D%2F10%20Marc%20Ribot%20-%20CD-01%20-%20Radio.mp3","nb_streams":2,"nb_programs":0,"format_name":"mp3","start_time":"0.025056","duration":"244.976327","size":"9840038","bit_rate":"321338","probe_score":51,"tags":{"title":"Radio","artist":"Marc Ribot","album_artist":"Marc Ribot","track":"10\/13","album":"Silent Movies","disc":"1\/1","publisher":"Pi Recordings","genre":"Avant-Garde;Avant-Garde Jazz;Jazz;Modern Creative","MusicBrainz Album Release Country":"US","MusicBrainz Album Status":"official","MusicBrainz Album Type":"album","MusicBrainz Album Id":"b22c59a6-308f-4b0d-8f0d-dbab5b32ff51","MusicBrainz Artist Id":"e6071b18-261e-46a1-8ee6-4dbd7f5f99f3","MusicBrainz Album Artist Id":"e6071b18-261e-46a1-8ee6-4dbd7f5f99f3","MusicBrainz Release Group Id":"ec18d03f-c1cf-4fe1-903c-2074a660892b","TMED":"CD","MusicBrainz Release Track Id":"8adcee7f-6c73-30b6-b041-b8b56fe0c988","TORY":"2010","date":"2010-09-28"}}}

Anyway disable transcoding engine in the settings as per a couple of duplicate issues.

3

Hi Tolriq,

I disabled transcoding. It got faster, I would say for most songs takes less than 5 seconds, some exceptions take like 10 seconds.

Are there any other options to speed it up?

What about the pre-cache situation, how does this works? I thought the incoming songs are supposed to be preloaded.

Thanks for the help.

4

Nothing more, be sure to have a playback size large enough and pre cache enough songs on wifi and on mobile.

5

Just wanted to add something.

I was playing with the settings again and I am not sure what I did, perhaps activating “prefer internal decoder”, anyway now it is fast! normal I would say.

I share again the logs so you might understand.