FLAC music playback is skipping now, anyone have a problem?

[Edgewood Dome]

Solved - it was my OE! FLAC music playback is skipping now, anyone have a problem?

Prior to the last big firmware update (v4.5 to 5.8 for me) my music played fine using FLAC, now after the update to v5.8 it has little gaps or skips. The music doesn't skip forward, just a fraction of a second gap in sound every 10 seconds to sometimes a minute apart. I ripped from CD using Exact Audio Copy, compression to FLAC using external program FLAC.EXE, bit rate set to maximum available which is usually around 896kBit/s, FLAC compression set to -8 which is maximum. I'm using a Patriot Supersonic MAGNUM 128GB USB, formatted with FAT32. I've tried reformatting the USB using various allocation unit sizes from 512 to 65536 and a few in between and the skips are still there. I formatted the USB using the "Quick Format" option from a free web application called Fat32format from Ridgecrop Consultants, LTD.

The music plays back fine on my PC and Squeezebox Touch, so I don't think the problem is with the USB or formatting, but I just don't know for sure.

It used to play fine, now it's almost useless. Anyone else have a problem after upgrading the firmware to 5.8? Any suggestions?

This has been solved. I'm embarrassed as an EE to say this was my fault, NOT the MS music player :redface:. I'm very carful to test everything well before posting, just missed it this time . All of the FLAC files play fine, it was a few old original WMA files out of the 4900 songs that I was playing. Go figure..
Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

 

[jerry33]

It used to play fine, now it's almost useless. Anyone else have a problem after upgrading the firmware to 5.8? Any suggestions?

Just the obvious. Did you reboot the display?

 

[roblab]

Prior to the last big firmware update (v4.5 to 5.8 for me) my music played fine using FLAC, now after the update to v5.8 it has little gaps or skips. The music doesn't skip forward, just a fraction of a second gap in sound every 10 seconds to sometimes a minute apart. I ripped from CD using Exact Audio Copy, compression to FLAC using external program FLAC.EXE, bit rate set to maximum available which is usually around 896kBit/s, FLAC compression set to -8 which is maximum. I'm using a Patriot Supersonic MAGNUM 128GB USB, formatted with FAT32. I've tried reformatting the USB using various allocation unit sizes from 512 to 65536 and a few in between and the skips are still there. I formatted the USB using the "Quick Format" option from a free web application called Fat32format from Ridgecrop Consultants, LTD.

The music plays back fine on my PC and Squeezebox Touch, so I don't think the problem is with the USB or formatting, but I just don't know for sure.

It used to play fine, now it's almost useless. Anyone else have a problem after upgrading the firmware to 5.8? Any suggestions?

Mine has always done that.

It's a feature, not a defect. I guess.

 

[Edgewood Dome]

jerry33 - nothing is obvious at this point and no I had not tried that, so thanks. Bad thing is, it didn't fix it. I also tried a different USB drive, no joy.

roblab - FLAC was the one solid format up to this point. A lot of folks had this skipping problem with MP3, but converting to FLAC always fixed it. That is why I re-ripped all of my music (4,900 songs) from CD to FLAC thinking it was the best, and it was working great for several months until the last firmware update.

As I said before, this music from the USB plays fine on my Windows7 PC, my Squeezebox Touch and previously in the MS, so I have to believe something has changed in the MS player.

Anyone have more suggestions what I might try?

 

[jerry33]

jerry33 - nothing is obvious at this point and no I had not tried that, so thanks. Bad thing is, it didn't fix it. I also tried a different USB drive, no joy.

My FLAC plays fine (At least, it does now that I've figured out that text with umlauts aren't read. Interestingly the umlauts show up on the display even though they are removed from the file names) but I'm on 5.6, not 5.8. 5.8 appears to be a very buggy release.

 

[trils0n]

My FLAC files play correctly on 5.8. Do all your FLAC files skip? I've had EAC make bad copies with skipping.

I also had a strange error with FLAC years ago that caused skipping. It gave a weird error message I can't remember right now, but ended up being a stick of RAM that was on the verge of going bad. I guess FLAC encoding was memory intensive and made the issue show itself, because the computer was working fine otherwise.

 

[ddruz]

Data point: My FLAC also plays fine on 5.8.