Hello,
We recently switched to Stereo Tool as our main audio processing. But something strange is happening, we have a hook container every hour, since using Stereo Tool you hear silence between the tracks. Sounds like the start next is not being used. If we disable Stereo Tool the problem is gone.
We think it has something to do with a buffer inside Stereo Tool, but we don’t experience this problem with other automation systems.
Can you help?
Can you please elaborate on your audio routing? Player output goes to sound card or directly into the Encoder? Where is Stereo Tool hooked in?
Player output goes directly into the encoder, Stereo Tool is used as a plugin on the encoder. It’s a server without a sound card, so no local sound output available.
Actually the encoder DSPs are just sitting in the master stream, they do not care where the signal came from, if it was a single file, a container, a stream… At that (late) stage, it has all merged into a single master signal.
An exception is regional content which is routed in extra stereo pairs and only merged on connection-level (according to the selected regions in the connection details).
Do you see the container signal on the peakmeter in the encoder status window?
Hook Containers are just ordinary containers where the Hook In/Fade/Out points are copied over to Cue In, Fade Out, Cue Out at the time the container is created. So the problem should be reproducable with ordinary containers as well. Can you try?
Tried the same tracks outside the container (so the container got generated, moved the tracks out). Same problem. Also with short tracks in a normal container, I noticed that also sometimes after the TOTH there is a short silence. Problem only occurs when I run several short tracks in a row, almost like mAirlist is still buffering the next track when it already needs to start. If I preview the audio it is ok (preview on a remote machine with a soundcard).
I also had a problem on my home pc if I add an additional local output and enable stereo tool, the sound is stuttering on the local soundcard (Tried Asio, WASAPI and DirectSound). The problem goes away when I change the soundcard buffer to the same number of the StereoTool latency (4096 samples).
Not sure if the problems are related, but if there is a a way to increase the latency on the encoder, I think that would help.
So you think the gap is because mAirList takes a long time to load the item? Does the player display LOADING when this happens?
The encoder has no latency or buffers, everything is processed as fast as possible, as fast as the slowest link in the processing chain permits.
No there is no LOADING. Could it be that it is CPU related? I’m using pretty high quality setting in Stereo Tool, I know that Stereo Tool only uses 2 cores (left and right channel) for multi threading, the server has 4 cores but maybe mAirlist is using 1 of the cores that is also used by Stereo Tool?
I will have a look at the resource monitor when the problem is happening. Keep you posted