Some final analysis of the ripping problems below. I’ve focused on these, as there’s not much I can do or say about the hangs, crashes & reboots, and also, in my book, these FLAC errors would get a higher severity on the bug list, since they are invisible to the users (who assume, from the large friendly letters on the Star’s display, that everything is hunky-dory) but are audible when they play these tracks. At least the other issues are immediately apparent.
So, first issue: the zeroes, let’s call them white-outs, in the encoded tracks. Audio analysis looks like this:
Top track is the one with zeroes, middle track is the correct one after re-ripping, bottom one is the difference between these two. Zooming on on the problem area:
Looks to me like a bug of the buffer underrun type, i.e. a process is reading a number of bytes from its input buffer without adequately checking that these bytes are actually available (e.g. because the process writing to it hasn’t produced the data yet), ending up reading zeroes.
Second issue: errors in the encoded track. Audio analysis is a bit more complicated, since these FLAC streams are invalid. If I correct them, then properly align them, it looks like this:
Again, top track contains the errors, middle track is the correct one after re-ripping, bottom one is the difference between these two. Zooming in:
Mind you, in this case the flatline part in the top track is actually garbled data that I had to manually repair for the FLAC file to load properly.
Looks to me like a bug of the buffer overflow/overwrite type, i.e. a process is writing a number of bytes to an output buffer (could be a circular buffer) without adequately checking whether there’s room for the data (e.g. because the process reading from it hasn’t consumed the data yet), ending up overwriting data.
But enough of the free black-box analysis. Let’s hear what Naim support have to say about this.
Is it written somewhere that it does?
