RadioBOSS slow on PC

[radiodungog]

Hello Dmitry,

For 5 weeks I have been presenting a weekly program with RadioBOSS on manual.  When I say manual I mean that I sit there and pause RadioBOSS between songs and make live announcements, give the time, and read the weather forecast.  I allow RadioBOSS to automatically insert scheduled events such as the news, adverts, community announcements and so on.

All of this works quite well except for the lag I experience between clicking the mouse on the screen icon buttons and the action taking place.  What I mean by this is that after I read the weather and have another song ready in the playlist I click the mouse on the play button and it takes a bit of time before the songs starts to play.  To get around this I sometimes click the mouse a bit early to make up for the lag and sometimes that works okay and other times I come unstuck because the song starts with a BANG ... a high volume start.

I'm trying to work out how to get around this problem but I thought I would ask for assistance.

The PC structure is:
Intel Core i3 CPU 530 @ 2.93 GHz / 2.93 GHz
RAM 4 GB
mini-ITX motherboard
Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit
Graphics card is nothing special and integrated on motherboard

Windows Aero is enabled.

LCD monitor is connected via an HDMI cable.

Keyboard and mouse is connected via USB and a USB hub.

Our music library is stored on a Vortexbox and is 2m away via an Ethernet cable.


Should I throw $60 at the PC and buy a decent graphics card and hope for the best ?  From what I can see this is the only performance piece of hardware that could be letting us own.

Should I disable Aero to lighten the graphic load ?


What would you suggest ?


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

It's unlikely to be a graphics card issue. And I don't think disabling Aero will help.
How much lag it is? Tests show it's usually about 100ms, which is not many IMO.

Do you use antivirus software? If so, it could be a problem. AV software scans files on access and this scan can slow down track playback.

Regarding "high volume start" - I think you should enable Fade In to prevent this from happening.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Okay, I'll look at the things you have suggested.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

The next beta version (4.9) update will also have several optimizations to decrease the time it takes to start a track.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

I haven't got in front of our main PC yet but when I do I'll knock out some of those unnecessary features like mentioned above and check to see if "Windows Security Essentials" is installed.  The slowness might be a whole range of things just adding up to the delay.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[nelson c]

I'm glad. I noticed that when the PC is very saturated (For example I installed a very large), there is a small quiet until you start playing the next track.
If I recurdo, this did not happen before. is something that occurred in a later update to 4.7 RB

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry, Nelson C,

We are seriously looking at the performance of our HDDs and the RAID configuration of our NAS with a view to overcoming any bottlenecks.  Here are some very good videos on YouTube by Tech Quickie that explain some of the performance issues with spinning HDDs and using the wrong RAID configuration.  This is good stuff

Samsung 840 SSD Tech Quickie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7AeL6rqHs8

RAID 5 & RAID 6 - All You Need to Know as Fast As Possible
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8ZecG9iOI

RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 - All You Need to Know as Fast As Possible
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7Bfw9lFfs


Hope this is helpful,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

A little research about track startup time.
If you uncheck the "Remove gap between tracks" in Settings->Playback->Misc (1), turn off "Trigger Mix at" (2) feature and also turn off the Track Information panel, the track startup is almost instant, this is the fastest it can be for now.

If you have "everything on":
(1) and (2) perform track scanning, it takes some time - depending on CPU speed, it is something around 70ms.
Track Information reads the picture and tag and then it needs to display this info: another ~30ms. It also depends on CPU mostly.
The playback itself takes about 20ms to start.
You use network storage, so network lag adds another 50-100ms (I didn't measure it).
Antivirus scans file on access, not sure how much time it takes.

In the result, it will take about 0.2-0.3 seconds to start a track under said conditions.

Also, if you need speed, change spinning HDD's for SSD.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yep, well done, good calculations.  They are very useful to know about.

I remember when we had a RAID-1 array on the Vortexbox music library and one of the WD Green 2TB HDDs went faulty we had 5-10-15 seconds delay between songs.  Back then the HDDs did not have TLER enabled and the OS tried to recover the faulty HDD over and over again making data collection for the music files very slow.  Once the music file was accessed and finally downloaded to RadioBOSS it ran smoothly without gaps, dropouts or distortion.

So from that example we know that a busy NAS or a congested LAN can cause gaps between songs.  Of course a failed HDD is an extreme case and now with different HDD firmware and TLER enabled it will drop the faulty HDD from the RAID array after 7 seconds - leaving the healthy HDD to serve out the data without any further interruption.

Those figures above were for MP3 320Kbps music files which were about 7-10 MB.

I would imagine the gap between songs would have been much worse if we were playing FLAC files of 30-40 MB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[nelson c]

Thanks for the data, we still do not possess a center of Disk Storage NAS, but this in the plans for this year.
We currently use a shared folder on windows, but with this we are not happy.

Nor do we have assembled a RAID configuration on the PC, only backup several hard drives that are not in use.

 

[djsoft]

Jamie, I think the bottleneck in track startup time is the network access to hard drive. Probably your NAS has settings for caching and other things to optimize it for speed. I'd start with these.

I did some tests on 50Mb FLAC files and they seem to start slightly slower (about 10-20ms slower) than 8Mb mp3's. Not a big issue IMO, on SSD drive the difference between 8Mb and 50Mb file load is 0 ms (it's so little we can't measure it).

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Another observation.

> Settings > Options > Playback > Miscellaneous > Remove gap between tracks

Looking at the online manual the default settings shown are:

http://manual.djsoft.net/radioboss/en/miscellaneous.htm

Threshold start: -35 dB ...  Threshold end: -43 dB


We had ours set to:

Threshold start: -30 dB ...  Threshold end: -40 dB


We then changed it to:

1. Threshold start: -30 dB ...  Threshold end: -30 dB

2. Threshold start: -30 dB ...  Threshold end: -25 dB

3. Then back again to > Threshold start: -30 dB ...  Threshold end: -30 dB


Our VU meter on RB only goes down to -30dB and the VU meter on the studio mixer goes down to -20dB (also shown as 0% on the lower scale).  As music goes both those levels are very very low.

When the threshold end is set to -25 dB the delay in swapping to the next track seems much quicker.  The decrease in delay is quite noticeable to the listener.

So my questions are:

1. Does threshold end only apply to the end part of the track and not the entire track ?  So in other words, if we were playing a track that had a quiet section in the middle of it would the -25dB threshold still be taken into effect ?

2. Do you think -30dB and -25dB is too low a setting for trouble fee operation ?



Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

When the threshold end is set to -25 dB the delay in swapping to the next track seems much quicker.  The decrease in delay is quite noticeable to the listener.

How long delay is and was - is it something like half a second? Maybe you should try starting same tracks from local hard drive and see if it's network which causes a delay.
Higher values for Gap Killer (-25 is higher than -35, this can be confusing sometimes) lead to slightly increased delay in track startup as it has to scan bigger portion of a track.
The fact that Gap Killer is on, adds ~100ms delay for track startup. Varying its settings you'll change the delay for only 5-10 ms.

1. Does threshold end only apply to the end part of the track and not the entire track ?  So in other words, if we were playing a track that had a quiet section in the middle of it would the -25dB threshold still be taken into effect ?

Yes, it's applied only to the end of the track. It doesn't look in the middle. Once level is higher than specified, it won't scan any more.

2. Do you think -30dB and -25dB is too low a setting for trouble fee operation ?

I think it shouldn't cause any trouble. -25dB setting will cut more than -40dB setting, that's it. Test on various tracks and see if it's good for your situation or not.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Another interesting thought.  If our Ethernet dropped from 1Gbps back to 100Mbps then the max data transfer would be 12.5 MB/sec.  If an MP3 song was 7.5 MB then the time to transfer the hole song would be 0.6 sec or 600mSec.  That is a sizeable delay and would not be acceptable.  Our network is Gb Ethernet but I'm just showing what could happen with slower Ethernet.


Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Jamie,

RB doesn't need to transfer the whole file to start playback, it reads it in small chinks while file is being played. So you could start a 300Mb file over a 10Mb and should be fine

But applying Gap Killer/Trigger Mix At can require large amount of data at once - so if playing files over a network is slow, those are the features that should be turned off first.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Another solution is to use MpTrim - to adjust the track volume and trim the silent or unwanted parts of the track.  This is not my preferred option because we use FLAC files as our master and changes to the FLAC means a whole heap of work to do downstream afterwards and the opportunity to forget to do one of the processes.

The thought of having some MP3s done correctly and other not done correctly but all sitting together in the music library would be annoying.

http://www.mptrim.com/


Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Converting FLAC to MP3 and back could lead to quality degradation. I believe there should be a software like FlacTrim
Or, as they have WavTrim on that web site, convert Flac to Wav, process it and convert back to Flac.

The idea to prepare tracks and turn off Gap Killer to reduce startup delay is good. But you'll also need to turn off Trigger Mix At feature to completely disable track pre-scanning.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Good suggestions but:

1. We only transcode FLAC to MP3 and never in reverse, so any MpTrim is applied only to the MP3 files and is not reflected back to the FLAC.

2. If there was a gadget called FLACtrim it would be interesting BUT there are some advantages in keeping the FLAC as an exact copy of the original CD.  Having an original copy of the CD is a good long term benefit because it prevents you from destroying it and making it useless.  HDD storage is very cheap these days so storing the original FLAC files in an unmodified folder is probably a good idea - then copying them to a working FLAC folder to do the mods to.

Okay on Gap Killer and the Trigger Mix settings ....  We will build up a small playlist to test some of these ideas and measure the delays.


Thanks,  Jamie C.