Now that we’re all indoors a lot more I’ve taken to listening to the JB Radio 2 FLAC stream for longer periods of time, and it’s become clear that it stops every 25 minutes, give or take a minute. Hit Play and it starts up again, and lasts another 25 minutes.
Anyone else experiencing this? It’s an entry in a playlist M3U file, playing via Minimserver on the Raspberry Pi and transcoded from FLAC to WAV into a 272. Given the regularity of the 25 minutes between failure I’m concerned that it might be another nail in the coffin of the 272.
The normal stream as preset 1 doesn’t appear to suffer the same dropouts.
Do you have any other device that can connect to the Pi, perhaps via USB? If so, do you get the same problem?
Does the 272 show the buffer level gradually emptying, or does the dropout occur suddenly.
I’ve just put it on so will see what happens. At present the buffer level is settled around the centre, flicking between 3 to 5 bars (of 10) on the display.
Thankd for that. I’ve added it as a station and it is working fine. It shows up in my Naim app as OGG VORBIS 96.0KHz 1137kb/s, though the kb/s varies a little. Sounds good though.
That’s odd, the network should be able to send enough data to keep the small buffer in the 272 full with ease. I wonder if there’s a problem with the way that Minimserver is processing the stream.
Presumably the 272 has no trouble with other lossless streams?
Tbh this JBR2 stream is the only one I leave on for that amount of time. I’ve played full albums through Tidal without issue and habitually leave BBCR2 & 4 on for long periods, but they’re ‘normal’ streaming.
Funnily enough I left it 25 minutes, checked the buffer - now settled at about 3 bars - and as I turned away it stopped, so I don’t know if it suddenly dropped away to zero or something else happened.
I’m assuming you’d expect the buffer to be full, or close to, if all is well. That’s what I’d expect - plenty of leeway.
Does anyone else see the buffer down between 3-5 bars on the 272 when listening to the FLAC stream?
It’s quite likely the issue is at my end, it would be useful to confirm this. If anyone has a few moments to spare (!!), could you fire it up pls? Press the i button on the remote to display the buffer state. Thanks.
We investigated this one a few months back and also wrote to JBRadio, but didn’t get a reply after multiple attempts to make contact.
The problem comes down to an Icecast config issue. Primarily as bit rates go up, the default settings for Icecast are not reliable.
Primarily there are two settings ( http://icecast.org/docs/icecast-2.4.1/config-file.html ):
queue-size - default:512kbytes. For high def streaming this is way too small and needs to be around 2Mbbytes.
Burst size - default 64kbytes. Again for high def streaming this needs to be around 1MB at least.
When these values are too tight then the stream will only be reliable when end listeners are close to the radio stations CDN, or they have a top class internet link. I think in this case Canada.
FYI - the stream is FLAC in an OGG container which is a standard way to deliver a FLAC stream for internet radio streaming.
