Clipped ending of some very short tracks

[John Ross]

Hi,

I appear to have found an issue with the way "Hi Fi Cast" handles very short tracks at the beginning of albums.

I'm listening to Big Finish's "Doctor Who: Tenth Doctor Adventures - Death and the Queen".  The first track is only 0:52 and the second is 0:43.  The last second of track 1 is clipped (the last word of dialogue is missing) and the segue to track 2 is not gapless (there's a very brief pause).

It happens *both* when streaming from my Synology NAS *and* when playing from "This Device" (which is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra).  So whatever is happening, it's definitely at the player, not server end.

Playing the same tracks directly from the CD are fine.  Similarly, streaming the same tracks to my Cambridge CXN via Streammagic is also fine.  The issue appears to be unique to Hi-Fi Cast.

I'm sure I noticed this happening before, but can't remember the album.  Finding two very short tracks at the start of an album is very rare, so it's not a major problem, but is it something that's fixable?

Could it be something to do wth the way that Hi-Fi Cast caches data?

Thanks!

John

[John Ross]

Just to add 2 extra bits of info:

The tracks in question are FLACs

Also, I just noticed that Synology's AudioStation does the same thing when streaming these tracks from my NAS.  So now, Cambridge/StreamMagic is fine, but Hi-Fi Cast and AudioStation are not.  Could this actually be some kind of Android issue?

[John Ross]

I'm starting to think that certain albums are more affected than others.  A couple of Big Finish audio dramas, though ripped directly from CD, play from my Android with a very slight drop-out between tracks.  They sound perfect if I cast them to my Denon receiver, for example, but when streamed from my phone itself, either directly from my NAS or from the local device itself, the drop-outs are there...

Has anyone else experienced gapless issues when playing directly from a local device, e.g. Samsung/Android phone...

[John Ross]

So I installed POWERAMP to see how that would respond to gapless playback.  POWERAMP doesn't stream from network devices, unfortunately, but it does play directly from Android phones and it played these tracks perfectly, without a hiccup between tracks.

So there's something POWERAMP is doing, during gapless playback, that Hi-Fi Cast isn't doing.  Are there any settings that can remedy it?  (I far prefer Hi-Fi Cast)

[Hi-Fi Cast Developer]

IIRC, Poweramp implments gapless by sending a single audio stream to the UPnP/DLNA playback device. Hi-Fi Cast uses the more conventional UPnP/DLNA method of 'telling' the playback device the URL of the next track to play while the current one is playing.

The only setting in Hi-Fi Cast that might help (unlikely though) is 'Eventing mode' (to find this setting, go to the 'Playback Devices' screen and tap the settings icon for your playback device).

[John Ross]

Ooh I think I might have fixed it, through a bit of trial and error.  I went to "Playback Devices > This Device > Settings" and changed the "Audio Decoding Method" from "Default" to "Alternative" and VOILA!  Gapless is now perfect, both when streaming from my NAS to phone, and when playing content stored on the phone itself.  The problem appears to be Android based, and "Alternative" appears to override it (though I'm not sure what is actually does, if I'm hones!)