audio stutters after several minutes of streaming

[CHNtentes]

Hi,
First of all, I want to thank you for your great work. I only expected it would be suitable for music, but it turns out that the latency is enough for video/gaming.
However, there is an issue: Every time I start streaming the audio is fine, but after some time (I would say about 10-20 minutes) , the audio begins to stutter and crack a lot. Then if I restart streaming it would work well again.
Is there any tip you could show me about this issue? I stream to a Sonos Era 100 btw.

[dheijl]

Is your Sonos wired or is it a WiFi connection?
Also, if you're gaming I can imagine that swyh-rs does not get enough CPU to keep up with the audio capturing. You can always try to give it a higher priority in the task manager.

[CHNtentes]

Thanks for your reply.
There's no wired connection, I just connect my Sonos and PC to same Wi-Fi.
I tried to set swyh program to realtime priority in task manager, but the issue remains.
Even when I'm gaming, the CPU usage usually is less than 30%.
Could my network connection quality have something to do with this?

[dheijl]

This leaves 2 possibilities that I can see:

• your wireless network is sometimes too busy, but why only after 20 minutes or so beats me

• the sample clock of your Sonos runs slightly faster than the sample clocck of your PC, so that inevitably after a certain time the Sonos network delay buffer will get empty because the samples arrive slower than they are consumed, and restarting the music fixes it temporarily.

Edit: from 1.10.5 on you can also let swyh-rs do some buffering, what happens if you enable let's say a 100 msec buffer? Does the time before stuttering begins increase?

[ibaraki-douji]

Hey, currently having the same issue, yes i'm also on wifi (both sonos and laptop).
Regarding your question setting an initial buffer did not change anything for me.

I can understand sometimes it's because i hit 100% CPU due to what i do, but most time after 15/45m the audio start to stutter more and more (if i keep the audio in stutter for 5m i then have bigger stutters of .5s without audio).

Also i don't think the wifi is busy as i'm alone with the sonos, my computer and my phone on it.

And to finish, i think the most probable cause is yes the sonos that gets desync due to something (maybe the clock, but idk how to check).

Maybe a test to check if it's the clock (replace the sonos with a pc/phone) :

• Stream from a PC on WiFi
• Use another PC/Phone and play the audio
• Check if the stutter also occures in that case

[dheijl]

I'm afraid that the only thing you can do is a quick stop/start streaming in swyh-rs to get the Sonos in sync again.

[dheijl]

Question: are you streaming flac format, and if not, does using flac make any difference?

[ibaraki-douji]

Hi @dheijl , i wasn't using FLAC but WAV, i switched to FLAC and saw that for whatever reason there was an increasing delay between the pc audio and the sonos (at start .5s beacause buffer time, after 10m it was 5s delay). Sadly i wasn't able to listen for very long as people came visit me, but after 15m there was not stutter, i will keep you updated on this.

[dheijl]

As flac compresses the output an increase in the delay on startup is unavoidable.

But if the audio clocks on both devices are the same it should not increase after that.

So this seems to point to a difference in clock speed between the pc and the Sonos.