I am having the same problem too. Particularly bad when streaming from Tidal. I have been using Audirvana on my Mac Mini setup now for 4 years with no issues. This seems to have shown up after a recent upgrade of a Audirvana a month or two ago. I just upgraded to the latest version two days ago and the problem has become much worse. The glitches and skipping are occurring on almost every track from Tidal and often in the same places within the track.
Have you tried turning on-off the integer mode? What you can also try is to make the pre-load cache smaller.
I just tried to play Thunderstruck from Tidal on 2 different Macs from 2015 using both 3.5 and AS. It worked perfectly. I tried with few different versions of Thunderstruck and 3 different DACs.
Thunderstruck was just an example. The problem that I and other Tidal users are having is that if you stream any album, eventually a track will glitch and repeat a second of the song, or move forward a second.
It might happen on track 1 or track 5, but it will always happen.
In this long thread, you’ll also hear from Windows users too - again, only through Tidal streaming.
I’ve used two different computers, 2 DACs, just the onboard DAC for my computer, different internet networks - same problem since an audirvana update a couple of months ago.
Jason
I’m having the same issues on both Macs with different DACs upscaling using Tidal. M1 Mac mini upscaling DSD is unbearable and has been for 6 months like scratching skipping you name it. Because it skips a couple of times during the song the time is out of sync so when the songs gets to about 5 secs to the end it’ll change to next track as it thinks because of the skips it’s at 0:00. Maybe it’s buffering. Both Mac the same one intel one Apple silicon. Different DACs one upscales to DSD 128 the other upscales to Custom 25/96Khz I use Exclusive Mode, Integer Node and Large CoreAudio I/O buffer they’re all turned on.
SoX Filter Bandwidth 99.5
SoX Filter Max Length 30000
SoX Filter. Anti Alaising 100
SoX Filter Phase Min Phase
For me the issue seems to be isolated to Tidal. I observe all the issues described above. It does not seem to occur when playing my local library with the exact same settings and same DAC. It does not occur on all Tidal tracks and I am even observing that the exact same track but on a different album can play fine. I don’t have other streaming services so I can’t say if this is a streaming problem or just Tidal. I upsample but not to DSD. It occurs both on MQA and non-MQA tracks, but I just noticed that if I’m playing an MQA track, the MQA indicator in Audirvana occasionally flips off for a second and a second or two later I’ll hear the glitch. This seems to be a sync issue with Tidal.
I have the same problem as well using Tidal with Audirvana on Windows. It is fine on shorter tracks for me at DSD512 or PCM 768 but any longer track will stop about 15 minutes in and I have to use Task Manager to close Audirvana. It wont respond to any stop/play commands.
It didnt use to be like this. So either Audirvana changed something in the past few weeks or Tidal did. I have no buffer enacted because I find if I start bringing in any buffer “, even a tiny bit, then there starts to be problems with all of the tracks either advancing to the next track or ending early etc.
Very frustrating since it’s a more recent development.
I have the same issue and it happened after the latest Audirvana update. I run Mac OS El Capitan. I switch USB cable with an upgrade and it did the same hiccups. It seems to happen with higher resolution songs when streaming. Used my local library that are ripped in CD quality and it does not happen. Audirvana is set to Optimized for audio
My experience with the little pops and glitches is to have only Audirvana playing on my mac and to try various configurations. For instance:
7 MB pre-load
Extreme priority
Integer mode off
Oh okay. I misunderstood. That’s not 7mb that’s 7000+ mb. I thought there was a way to get the pre-load cache lower than 256 mb. I thought maybe lowering the cache even lower might help the issue that the folks here are facing.
I also misunderstood. Tell me why you want the pre-load lower? I would have thought higher allows Audrivana to read more evenly, not be interrupted by other CPU uses.
Damien (or maybe another member, not sure anymore) mentioned that lowering the cache might solve the issue. Like most users here with this Tidal streaming problem, I’ve set the cache at all sorts of different spots and no luck.
It seems to be cache related as I lowered it to the minimum and it hiccups many times per song. Moreover once it has reached the allowed cache, it occurs more often afterwards. Skipping a song seems to give it a fresh reset.
Hi Jason and all, here I am, joining the club from Tokyo, being frustrated and annoyed from songs skipping at the end on Tidal on Audirvana.
(another annoying thing is I hear some uncomfortable “zuppp!” noises, repeated within songs played on Tidal/Auridvana, i.e. separate topic)
I have noticed something today. It looks to me that Audirvana is recognizing the length of a song wrong. If you have a song to last 3:00, but Audirvana is showing the song length as 2:55 and turning to next song. Because, for Audirvana, the song was actually “2:55” so it just did played what’s supposed to be.
My 6th sense… there’s a bug in Audirvana where it misread song length from external streaming services, with a few seconds (or more) of gaps, so for listeners like us it often sounds like songs are “skipping”. It maybe that Audirvana UI is doing things just right, playing a 2:55 song until the end and playing next song. So it’s never been an issue with external DAC, buffer, comp ratio or anything. But actually the song is 3:00 and it does sounds like the song was skipped at the end.
