I used to have the “playback stopping a few seconds before end of track” problem (solved by Damien in 2019) on my late 2013 MB pro streaming Qobuz to my two iFi DACs. For a while, I didn’t upsample anything (cause my Mac was basically to slow for reliable DSD upsampling) and I didn’t have the problem.
Now I received my new M1 MacBook Air, which is very much capable of upsampling. A version of this problem is back, however.
The problem now is that near the end of tracks, usually with a few seconds left, Audirvana will just skip to the next track. So it won’t stop playing, just skip the last few seconds. Not very nice in general, but especially bad if your listening to big multi-track continuous works like operas.
I noticed this problem on multiple occasions:
2020 M1 Macbook Air running the latest native apple silicon version of Audirvana, streaming Qobuz, PCM upsampling (powers of 2), output to iFi iDSD
same MacBook, streaming Qobuz, upsampling to DSD128, streaming via network to KEF LS50 wireless version 2
But I can also reproduce it on my late 2013 MacBook Pro, latest Audirvana version, streaming Qobuz, upsampling PCM (powers of 2), output to iFi iDSD.
In all cases, exclusive access = yes, large core audio I/O buffer = yes
It seems not to occur when upsampling is disabled.
So it seems to be a more general problem, probably unrelated to the new apple silicon architecture…?
I would very much like to be able to use the DSD (and PCM) oversampling options, so I hope this can be fixed.
I read the similar threads here on the forum… I don’t seem to be the only one experiencing this problem, and it happens with a wide variety of DACs. Furthermore, it doesn’t happen when oversampling to higher PCM rates or DSD using HQPlayer. It has something to do with how Audirvana handles the buffer, especially when a low buffer size is chosen.
As has been described in another thread, sometimes the total track time visibly changes in Audirvana, during playback (a few seconds less) when the ‘light blue’ part of the progress bar is reached, minutes before the actual end of the track is reached. Then, at the end of the track, these seconds are indeed skipped. This has nothing to do with the DAC.
I have increased my buffer size to 6.556 MB (randomly chosen, total memory on my Mac is 8GB), that seems to work for shorter tracks. But it still happens in tracks longer than 5m44s (precisely) when oversampling to DSD128. That means that when listening to a whole symphony or opera (with individual tracks anywhere from a few minutes to 30+min) it will probably happen a few times.
Whether I use a smal or large buffer size shouldn’t matter, it remains a bug, something that I (and presumably a lot of other people) would like to be solved.
If you are using upsampling and you have issue with the audio playback, this thus means it’s a DAC issue as there is DAC on the market that only want to do the upsampling internally of the DAC and not using third party software.
Both DACs that I own (iFi iDSD nano and the DAC inside the iFi Stereo 50) are specifically marketed as being able to play upsampled PCM and DSD rates.
Also, I don’t see how the DAC would cause Audirvana to display a wrong playing time?
Moreover, when using HQPlayer to upsample to DSD128, both my DACs have no issue at all. I don’t know how hqplayer handles buffer, but evidently it is possible to upsample without having this issue.
Browsing the forum, there are a lot of other people (with different DACs) reporting similar problems.
I can post my debug info later today.
Thank you for looking into this.
