Music Cutting Out on Mac to PS3

[nsainfreek]

Not sure what to search for in these forums or if the topic has already been covered but I have Media Server installed, PS3 sees it fine and see my files ok, but when I play music it cuts off at random points. Thought it might have been a buffer issue so I adjusted the buffer in the settings but it didn't fix it. I also had it on wireless so thought that the connection was slow so I plugged it in and it still cuts out.

If someone could forward me to the answer that would be most helpful. Thanks!

[red2002yzfr1]

I am having the same problem. Was there an update to this question?

[Matt42]

I got very similar symptoms, albeit with a totally different configuration: Brand new NAS QNAP 119 at latest firmware level (TMS 4.4.17), brand new Denon AVR-4310 at latest firmware level, with wired connection via Fast-Ethernet router. Randomly but consistently, every couple of minutes the music cuts out for a number of seconds. Sounds like a buffer underrun, but unlikely with this bandwidth -- there is no other network traffic.

Any hint what could cause this? ... how to diagnose? ... how to fix?

Thanks in advance,
-Matt

[Twonky_Rick]

Are both of you playing MP3s only -- or other file formats as well? Does it always stop at the same place or is it random?

- Rick

[Twonky_Rick]

I just checked with Christian Gran (the technical guru beyond TwonkyMedia) and he has two suggestions for you to try:

1. Try setting the Nic Restart option to 1. This can help with unstable wi-fi networks
2. It best if you only have one connection open at a time. Either wireless or wired. It's easy to disable the wireless connection on most laptops. It's also possible to turn off the hardwired connection.

Please let us know if either of these suggestions work for you and also answer my previous question. Thanks.

- Rick

[Matt42]

In my case, the connection is wired at either end, with no wifi even present on QNAP TS-119 and Denon AVR-4310. And yes, there are only MP3s (plus album art) involved.

[Twonky_Rick]

That's strange. We have a Denon 3808 at work and it works great. It's never stopped on us.

Does it always stop on the same songs or is it random?

- Rick

[Matt42]

Unfortunately, it is completely random.

BTW, the Denon was configured from "Generic DNLA 1.5" to "Denon-4308" manually by me (side question: how does that change behavior?)

Next to the wired Denon, I got a Philips LED-TV, connected wirelessly, and recognized as "Generic DNLA 1.0" -- some investigation today shows that it doesn't have such outages. Actually I am better off streaming music via wifi to the TV, rather than via wire to the Denon. Weird. Can the client setting in Twonky influence that? Or should I suspect a Denon problem then? Any other Denon 4310 owner connecting to Twonky having such issues?

Thanks for your help, and further ideas welcome. (E.g.: The WLAN AP/Router is >5yrs old -- potential problem? But why would wifi work to the Philips TV and wired to the Denon would not?)

[cougar14]

Don't limit your troubleshooting to Denon appliances.

This issue has been occurring with Twonky for a long time on various devices.

http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3562

http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5015

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=1 ... 5&start=30

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=177&t=4946

I also have this issue and it drives me insane. I thought it was a QNAP issue at first, but I have the same problem with my Synology DS109j

It would be great if somebody @ twonky recognised that this is a real problem and did something to at least troubleshoot why it is happening.

Pretty please?

[Twonky_Rick]

Since you said pretty please, I guess I've got to help you now.

Alright. I'm going to create an official support ticket for this isse which will be assigned to an engineer to replicate. It's important that we describe this problem accurately in a way they can replicate it. If they can't replicate it, they can't fix it.

Here is what I have so far:

Music streamed from TMS cuts out on devices including PS3, Xbox 360, Denon, etc. Not a wireless issue. Problem occurs on wired connections as well.

I need some more info to create a ticket on this.

- Does this happen on PCs running TMS or just NAS systems? Which NAS systems have this problem?
- Does this problem occur on TMS 5.0 and 5.1.1 as well as TMS 4.4.x?
- Can you suggest steps a developer could follow to replicate this issue?
- Can someone send me a log for this?

I'm sure some of these answers are in the forum posts you references, which I will attach to this ticket, but it would save us all time if you could help summarize this.

Lastly, I apoligize that it's taken so long for this issue to get the attention is deserves. With your help, hopefully we can fix it once and for all.

- Rick

[Twonky_Rick]

BTW, the Denon was configured from "Generic DNLA 1.5" to "Denon-4308" manually by me (side question: how does that change behavior?)

Next to the wired Denon, I got a Philips LED-TV, connected wirelessly, and recognized as "Generic DNLA 1.0" -- some investigation today shows that it doesn't have such outages. Actually I am better off streaming music via wifi to the TV, rather than via wire to the Denon. Weird. Can the client setting in Twonky influence that? Or should I suspect a Denon problem then? Any other Denon 4310 owner connecting to Twonky having such issues?

- Wired is almost always better than wireless. Sometimes having both enabled, causes problems however. Try to prevent that if possible.
- I don't know exactly what the difference is between the two profiles you mention.
- We encourage customers to try other devices setting when they are having problems.
- I'm unaware of other Denon 4310 users having this issue.

- Rick

[Matt42]

I need some more info to create a ticket on this.

- Does this happen on PCs running TMS or just NAS systems? Which NAS systems have this problem?
- Does this problem occur on TMS 5.0 and 5.1.1 as well as TMS 4.4.x?
- Can you suggest steps a developer could follow to replicate this issue?
- Can someone send me a log for this?

- Not sure about PC, personally I am running on a NAS, namely QNAP TS-119
- My latest QNAP firmware includes TMS 4.4.17, don't know about newer versions.
- Steps, hm ... connect NAS to router, router to Denon AVR-4310, using "standard naive setup", play music from NAS via Denon, wait for music to stop ... let's see whether that'll be reproducible. Others on this thread are using different devices.
- If you tell me how I am willing to create and send a log; it's >10yrs that I used any Unix shell, and so far I haven't connected to my NAS other than via network shares, so I would need instructions for dummies.

I understand the difficulty in trying to reproduce an intermittent error like this and appreciate your willingness to help!
Regards, Matt

[Twonky_Rick]

Thanks Matt. This helps a lot. Does anyone else have input on this as well?

- Rick

[Matt42]

Hm ... anyone else willing to participate in diagnosing that problem?

FWIW, I keep having the problem and needing a solution. So Rick, once you let me know what kind of log information you need and how to configure the server on my NAS to provide it, I certainly will do. These outages currently completely prevent me from using Twonky for streaming music at all (by now the entire family starts screaming whenever there is another break in the music), so I am certainly motivated to help diagnosing the root cause.

Thanks, Matt

[Twonky_Rick]

I've asked for instructions how to create a log on a NAS system.

Although I don't think I've collected enough information yet to do much about this, I did create a ticket, so we can track progress on this issue. It's TMCORE-962.

Is anyone experiencing this issue with TMS 5.0 or TMS 5.1?

- Rick

[mstrelan]

I can confirm that this is happening for me on a laptop running Ubuntu 9.10 and Twonky Media Server 5.0.68. The issue occurs on every mp3 I tried, usually after approximately 1 minute but sometimes much earlier.

This is definitely a show stopper. I will happily purchase Twonky if this is resolved

[Twonky_Rick]

Thanks. I've added this info to the support ticket.

- Rick

[mstrelan]

I forgot to mention that both are on wireless to a Belkin router. The model is a custom router from my Australian ISP (iiNet). Not sure if this helps, I am going to try wire them straight up with no router and see if it helps.

[Matt42]

Good point, to bring up the router. I had already initially suspected that might be the root cause for my problem, but got no indication from anywhere that this could be true. Still, yesterday I replaced my old (about 5 yrs) Siemens Fast Ethernet Router with a brand new DLink DIR-855. Since then, everything works fine, I have streamed music for hours from the QNAP NAS without any flaw.

So it's not just the speed of the router (the Denon still runs "only" at 100MBps), it's also traffic shaping (and other stuff a router might be doing or not that I have no clue about).

Anyway, looks like you can remove me from TMCORE-962. Mayb you want to keep the information there that at least in one case an old router was causing the problem.

Thanks!

[Twonky_Rick]

Thank for letting us know that an old router was the cause of this issue for you. I wouldn't have expected that.

- Rick

[chrises]

I'm glad I finally found some people with the same problems as me. I hope Twonkey can solve these problems, it would make me very happy. Here is my situation:

First configuration:
Linksys router WRT54GL 10/100 mbps
Sony Playstation 3 (wired)
Freecom NAS NDPro (wired) with Twonkey Media server 4.4.2

Second configuration:
Netgear Gigabit router WNDR3700 with 8-port gigabit switch
Sony Playstation 3 (wired 1GB)
Freecom NAS NDPro 1 TB (wired 1GB) with Twonkey Media server 4.4.2

When I play mp3-files with my PS3 from my Freecom NAS, the music stops randomly for a few seconds. At first, I thought is was a router-problem but with my new netgear router and switch I experience exactly the same problems. I am using my router as DHCP-server but al my hardware-devices have dedicated IP-adresses.

Besides this I have another problem with streaming media from the Freecom NAS to the PS3. I can stream M2TS-files (or MTS) but the PS3 won't give file-information like time-length and date of recording. When I stream media (also M2TS-files) from a USB-device to the PS3 I see all the file-information during playing.

I hope I gave enough information. If you want to have more just ask.

[Twonky_Rick]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the detailed report. We use our PS3 everyday with a NAS and have never had skipping problems. Nonetheless, I've forwarded your entire post to our developers and will let you know if they have any suggestions for you. The only think I can think of that might cause this is if the NAS is doing some type of housekeeping (or backing up a PC on your network) that is consuming a lot of CPU.

- Rick

[Twonky_Rick]

First configuration:
Linksys router WRT54GL 10/100 mbps
Sony Playstation 3 (wired)
Freecom NAS NDPro (wired) with Twonkey Media server 4.4.2

Second configuration:
Netgear Gigabit router WNDR3700 with 8-port gigabit switch
Sony Playstation 3 (wired 1GB)
Freecom NAS NDPro 1 TB (wired 1GB) with Twonkey Media server 4.4.2

When I play mp3-files with my PS3 from my Freecom NAS, the music stops randomly for a few seconds. At first, I thought is was a router-problem but with my new netgear router and switch I experience exactly the same problems. I am using my router as DHCP-server but al my hardware-devices have dedicated IP-adresses.

Besides this I have another problem with streaming media from the Freecom NAS to the PS3. I can stream M2TS-files (or MTS) but the PS3 won't give file-information like time-length and date of recording. When I stream media (also M2TS-files) from a USB-device to the PS3 I see all the file-information during playing.

1. I talked to Christian Gran (our head TMS developer) about the first issue and he cannot think of a reason this would occur.

2. Christian thinks the second issue may have been fixed in the PC version of TMS 5.1.1 - but we can not change the Freecom firmware - so the fix unfortunately won't be available to you.

Sorry I don't have better news.

- Rick

[gjsmsmith]

I just had this problem and found a FIX!!! (for me anyway) My Mybook 1tb NAS with Twonkymedia 5.1 was streaming MP3's to my xbox 360 and PS3 very unsuccessfully as the sound was cutting out (usual problem- sound gone, timer still running). Basically, whilst investigating, I decided to check my list of media recievers/clients in the options and for some reason my main router was listed there 192.blah.1.1 as a media reciever!!? i thought it was strange that twonkymedia was trying to 'feed' my router, so i unticked it on the lefthand side and voila! all fixed, no more sound cutting out hope this helps somebody. Gjsmsmith

[Twonky_Rick]

Thanks for letting us know this. I'll make sure to share this with our support team.

- Rick

[Korensky]

This seems to be the thread where people are talking about music cutting out but I get the same thing.

I'm running a Linksys NAS200 with the factory version of Twonky Media Server (4.x?) and just put my music library on to the NAS in the past week. The client is an Xbox360 which has previously had no dramas playing video. Music unfortunately cuts out randomly. The timer keeps going, the visualization on the TV is still moving but no audio is coming out of the speakers/hi fi. If I hit the dashboard controls etc the menu will still beep as I navigate so I know it's not local. If I leave it and it moves on to the next track, the audio starts playing again.

It's connected to the NAS via WiFi - the router is a Netgear WPN824v2 which also acts as a DHCP server for both devices. The NAS is connected to a wired port on the router.

Is there anything I can do to try and troubleshoot this? It's really disappointing and unfortunate as I had been really pleased with the video performance.

[Korensky]

Bump.. Any support reps able to assist? I'm happy to purchase a new version (instead of the one that comes bundled with the Linksys NAS) but would really like to know that this issue has been fixed since it makes the device unusable as an audio server.

[Twonky_Rick]

I'm not aware of a fix for this. Some client players and NAS hardware and more susceptible to skipping than others. Network traffic or wireless issues can also contributue to this.

- Rick

[knowldav]

Had exactly the same issue using QNAP TS-212 NAS and XBOX 360. I think I have fixed this as follows;

Log on to NAS and go TwonkyMedia Server page
( I'm currently running verison 5.1.6 )
Check the the Media Receivers settings in Advanced Setup
I was expecting only to see my XBOX, but there were a lrage number of listings
including 3 entries for XBOX.
Hit the Reset list to clear it all
Only receivers showing were now my XBOX and the laptop I was ruuning the server page on
Check the MAC addresses with the list on myy router to make sure that the XBOX was talking to the right device
Now all looks sensible, tried again.
restarted XBOX and on TwonkyMedia Server - Server Status watch as it builds database
Can see music tracks, photos, videos etc, being added.

When it looks like Twonky has finished building database started playing music

So far no issues..

No absolute conclusions but worth checking
1. Lsit of Receivers to make sure that only the receivers yu want are there and only once
2. Wait until the database has been built os that Twonly is too badgered when playing
My database was quite large and I wonder if it was getting a bit upset trying to stream and build DB at same time

Either way, seems fine now.

Hope this helps