Long delay before playback starts

[jhmvl]

Hi,

I am new at this forum, so if I ask a question that has been answered already then I overlooked the answer. My apologies in advance if that is the case, I tried to avoid it.

I experience a very long time in start of the playback of any track once I hit the play button. The delay is anywhere between 3 and 4 minutes and I understand from other topics on this forum that it should be a lot faster.

I have my music collection organized as it should be according to the discussion and it is on a NAS that is coupled as a drive. I experience this problem whether I play 44.1kHz, 96kHz or 192kHz tracks. They all lead to the same long delay in start-up after pressing play.

What I have tried:
- Change my music root from the NAS to an SSD that is internal in the computer that I currently use.
- Play with some settings like switching off HDCD coding.

These type of changes lead to the same delay, no change. This leads me to believe that it is not the fact that the music is on a NAS, but something else but I cannot figure out what.

Any help is appreciated.

Hans

[PeterSt]

Hi there Hans - and welcome here !

3-4 minutes ? for one track ? Attended ?
... seems inpossible to me. But must be something with your PC.

Even when Unattended, an on-par PC will start playback in 2 seconds or so. Maybe 4; this assumes a whole album to be loaded (and preprocessed etc.).
Of course, when this is Unattended and you try to load a 100 albums, the 3-4 minutes start to be normal. But I don't think this is your case.

When Attended (see button under Play button) playback start latency is dependent on the SFS (Split File Size as set in XXHighEnd's Settings), but will be maybe 10 seconds when set at the largest size (which is 470 or so).

N.b.: Unattended is when you see all the tracks passing by in the Playlist Area (they highlight) before playback starts.

Questions :

Attended / Unattended ?
Number of tracks and ~ total running time when Unattended ?
FLAC/WAV/MP3 ?
PC and processor (speed) ?
RAM Size ?
SFS ?
Always Copy to XX Drive On or Off ?

And once things play, no issues (stuttering etc.) occur ?

Let me know.
Kind regards,
Peter

[jhmvl]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the response. Much appreciated!

To answer the questions as methodological as possible:

• I am indeed referring to attended playback. I have tried unattended playback as well, there the result is the same. Once it plays it keeps on playing track after track without further delays. This holds for attended as well as unattended playback.
• I have mad a small example library to xxHighEnd and this library contains some albums as FLAC and some as WAV. No other filetypes.
• Number of tracks when I try unattended is 10-20 depending on what I try but no more. However, as said, the problem is the same whether in attended or unattended mode. The funny thing is that when in unattended mode it takes a long time for the first track to load but once that is done the other tracks of the album load very quickly. Playback in attended mode sort of shows the same behavior: first track takes long, next track is there immediately, but if you stop before the next track and then start playback on the next track then, again, it behaves as described, i.e. taking a long time to load.
• In terms of the specs of my pc: I know it is not up to par, but this is intended to be a first trial setup before I move on to creating a proper setup.
  Here goes:
  
  • Processor: Intel Xeon 5150@2.66GHz
  • Installed Ram: 4Gb
  • System Type: 32-bit
  Even though this is not the best set-up I guess it should be possible to start play back without too much delay.
  
• SFS = 4.00Mb, Mx = 150.00
• Copy to XX-drive by standard: off

Once everything plays I am a happy camper. I know that SQ can be a lot better but I think that it is already an improvement over other players. There is definitely no other issues once the playback has started. After that it works fine in attended as well as in unattended mode, definitely no stuttering.

Hans

[PeterSt]

Hans, I am now thinking of this :

Can it be so that any first track you attempt has diacritical marks in it ? Like é etc. ?
If Yes, try a first track (just Attended) without. But to be on the safe side, also don't have diacritical marks in the Album name. Or ... anywhere in the path ...

If this is not the case, we'll proceed with other stuff (to make up yet - haha) ...

Peter

[PeterSt]

Btw Xeon ? in what kind of machine is that ?
OS ?

Also please pay special attention to the Processor Core Scheme you selected, and whether that could resemble more than 2 cores (your 5150 is 2 only). I mean, I know there's a bug in XXHighEnd somewhere which is "capable" of letting you select e.g. scheme 1-3 (which assumes 3 cores at least) while you have 2 only. And now I don't know what happens.
So in your case only Scheme 1-2 is allowed.; please take care that that's the one selected (see under the [ Q ] button close to the bottom of the main screen).

Peter

[PeterSt]

And to eliminate all possible side effects, please use .WAV only for now.

Also :
When you play Attended, press Stop and within a few seconds you click Play on the next track, the same issue is there ?
And what if you click Stop and Play on the SAME track ?

[jhmvl]

Hi Peter,

I checked. No diacriticals in the test track (there are some of these on other test tracks, but not this one). Same result.

There are however spaces used in pathnames, so an artist name like for example ZZ top means that all albums from these guys will be in that dierectory as new directories (one for each album). Each of these directory names as well as the track names will contain spaces. I don't know if that is important but I thought I should mention it.

Hans

[jhmvl]

Hi Peter,

Yes it is a Mac running win7 now.

I will do the tests you suggest when I get home from work tonight.

Hans

[PeterSt]

Hans,

There are however spaces used in pathnames, so an artist name like for example ZZ top means that all albums from these guys will be in that dierectory as new directories (one for each album).

I am sorry, but I don't understand what you're saying here. I mean, all fine with that, but how are the (btw allowed) spaces related ?

And :

I can wonder how your coverart is organized. Depending on your answer I may have more questions about it. Anyway :
As JPEG's etc. in the album folder ?
In a separate sub folder ?
As tags inside the music file ? if not, what's the size (just one example suffices, as long as it's an album with this issue).

Do you see anything of the Coverart in XXHighEnd ?
What do you see in the right most (3rd) pane when near the bottom - right hand side -"Show Coverart" is activated (Red) ? If that's "one million covers" then that is the problem ...

Peter

[jhmvl]

Hi Peter,

What I mean with the example directory for ZZ Top is that there is a space in the name of the directory between ZZ and Top. But as far as I understood descriptions on the forum that should not be an issue but I mention it to be complete.

Coverart: I have coverart as a seperate file in the album directory and it is always called cover.jpg. I try to avoid having them as tags in the music file. My ideal set-up would be to work with a cue sheet and clean wav files but that is a separate project for a later time (any tips how to do that efficiently given that I have a very large collection of flac files now are appreciated but at a very low priority now).

Filesizes that I have tested so far vary between 33.6Mb (16bit 44.1kHz) up to around 190Mb (24bit, 192kHz). The issue is the same for all of them. Funnily enough the loading time is approximately the same for the 33.6Mb file as it is for the 190Mb file

The coverart does come up ok in xxHighEnd but I will say that xxHighEnd does something to it, i.e. tries to make it smaller or less resolution or whatever. In one of the cases, a picture that when viewed in a seperate viewer has the size of a normal CD is shown in xxHE as a very small picture. It does that to only that album, in other cases it just deteriorates the quality of the picture for some reason (read something about that on the forum but didn't feel that that would apply here) but not the size. As a note: I do take care to not use huge files coverart. All files are smaller than 100Kb.

What do you see in the right most (3rd) pane when near the bottom - right hand side -"Show Coverart" is activated (Red) ? If that's "one million covers" then that is the problem ...

I will check this when I get home tonight. I would say though that it might say one million covers, but in actual fact there are no more than 20 covers in the test library that I use now.

Hans

[PeterSt]

Thank you for now, Hans.

No Coverart should deteriorate, nor should it show smaller than reality. However, Coverart has to fit "somewhere" always, so it is easy to run into something which was made smaller.
Notice that I do not recognize any issue with this at any time (forum).
One thing : If the coverart shows in the left pane and you then resize the size (like height) of the XXHighEnd screen, it deteriorates for that moment. But I'm confident you don't mean that.

Do not hesitate to open a new topic for this and post (attach) a picture which such an issue with it. So if this is so (deteriorates) then I explicitly want to solve this; I am too keen on good pics ...

Thanks,
Peter

[jhmvl]

Hi Peter,

I tested your options and selecting core 1-2 solves the problem. It now starts very quick (within 2 seconds even for tracks with diacritical symbols).

I close that closes this problem. I will open a separate thread for the cover art.

Hans

[PeterSt]

Hey, great !

Can you tell me - what was it set to ?
and did you do that (which XXHighEnd abusivley allows for) or was the default wrong ?

An answer "I don't know" also suffices. It's good enough that the problem was solved.

Regards,
Peter

[jhmvl]

Hi Peter,

I can tell what is was set to. It was set to: No Appoint.

I have to assume that it was set to that value by default because I did not touch any of that earlier   .

Hans