Playback totally whacked out

[woodensoul]

Before making a bug report, I wanted to get feedback here.  With the CVS build from last night (09.27) I'm getting some very strange behavior during playback.  

Sometimes a song won't finish and jump right into the next one.  Sometimes a song will repeat when repeat is set to "off".  Nearly every time I play the first track in a directory, playback stops after the first track is finished instead of playing the next track in the playlist like it should.  I even got a loud distorted noise while the player incorrectly changed tracks.

This behavior did not start with last night's build, it has been going on for about a week.

Both my H320 and H120 exhibit these bugs.

[Llorean]

Could you give us some more information:

For example, have you tried using the record button to clear your settings on boot, and see if that resolves the problem?

Are you playing in TagCache or File Tree mode?

What settings have you changed from the default (though of course this won't matter if you can get the bug to continue happening after a reset-clear on an unpatched build.)

Are the files any particular format?

[woodensoul]

I have cleared settings and the problem persists.

Problem happens in TagCache and File Tree mode.

I have many settings changed from the default and I'm not sure that listing every one would be very helpful but I can if you think it will help.

Files are MP3 --alt-preset standard LAME encoded.

Build is unpatched.

[Llorean]

Okay, so tell me exactly how you go about getting this problem. Load a bleeding edge build, and clear settings while booting with the record button (make sure it says 'cleared'). Don't change any settings after that. In the filetree, without changing settings, can you get the problem to happen?

If so, describe what I'd need to do to try to get the same problem to happen, so I can see if I can reproduce it.

[woodensoul]

OK, so far the problem hasn't happened with all settings cleared and left that way.  I will try to get it to happen again tonight and see if I can find out if a specific setting may be causing the problem.

[mhebsacker]

I've had the similar problem with the builds from 26 and 27.9. (H140)

These where the first builds I tried since 18.7. - the last build before feature freeze was lifted - after basicly I am only interested in stable playback, gapless, replay gain and flexible playlists, so I didnt cared that f.e. tag cache implementation and some other stuff was not finished and blocking a 3.0.

Well, still after some time I wanted to try where rockbox is now, installed the nightly from 26.9. and new fonts,  I deleted all prefs (holding record during boot), imported my old prefs settings (only a few things are different from standard setting) and listended to a folder (CD).

Everyhting worked fine until the first Buffer refill. The song jumped, some white noise, and continuied at some other place. I tried to ffw and bckwd, and from then on eveything in the buffer seemed to be a mess.

Rebooted, soon had the same problems again, tried the build from 27.9. with same result.

So I reverted to the build from 18.7. which never gave me any problem and probably stay with it until there is a release. At least this one is pretty stable.

[woodensoul]

I was able to reproduce all the bugs I mentioned in my first post using the bleeding edge build from 9.28.  The only setting I changed was to set Repeat to "Off".  

Play a track in a directory.  Wait until the directory is finished playing and playback stops.  (You could probably skip forward to the end of the directory and wait for that track to finish.)  Navigate to another directory and play the first track.  Instead of playing the next track in the directory after playback for the first finishes, as it should be, playback stops after the first track.  If you play the second track now, playback seems to  continue correctly until (possibly the buffer runs out as mhebsacker mentioned) some loud static or white noise comes in the middle of a track and then the track repeats and finishes, then proceeds to play the next track without the track title changing to reflect the new track and the elapsed time continuing past the duration of the previously played track.  i.e. (7:15/5:34).  The elapsed time just continues to go up until you force the player to re-buffer the song.

The white noise/static thing doesn't happen every time but did happen a few times in 7 hours of listening last night.  Playback stopping after the first track in a directory happened several times.

[Llorean]

So, it sounds like it's related to the end of the directory? This then, never happens if you actually create a playlist and use that, instead of a dynamic playlist?

[woodensoul]

I haven't tried that.  I usually only use dynamic playlists because I listen to full albums mostly.  The bug involving white noise/track cutting out and repeating shouldn't have anything to do with the end of a directory though.  

I'll try with a created playlist to see if the (playback stopping) bug reappears.

[Llorean]

Well, Repeat on or off affects whether it attempts to continue out of the playlist or stays in the directory, so yes it could actually be affecting it quite easily. There are a lot of bugs relating to the end-of-folder behaviour as it is.

[woodensoul]

These problems aren't going away so I'll make a bug report.  Also, is there anywhere to download the last build before the feature freeze was lifted?  It's not on the "old" dailies page.

[pondlife]

Hi woodensoul,

I couldn't see a bug report for this, so I've added one - have a look at http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/6117 and see if you can add anything.

There's also a test H120 build there which might help, or might just result in other problems.

pondlife

[woodensoul]

Thanks for starting the bug report.  I will test your build tonight at work.  Also, I've been unable to reproduce any of the mentioned bugs while strictly playing from playlists created by myself.  It seems that these bugs have something to do with the end of a directory.  I don't think they've occured unless I allow playback to stop after reaching the end of a directory after which I play another directory.

[nieroster]

I noticed somthing that could be the outcome of the same problem:

When I play files from a directory, not using a playlist, it seems that the bufferhandling doesn't work right somehow. The first few tracks play fine, but when it comes to spin up the disk and read the next few tracks it sometimes skips back to the beginning of the current song. But the second time the song plays fine, so the reason for skipping is not a faulty file.

I noticed a few arbitrary skips, I think all of them backwards not one ahead to the next track. I turned the hold swith to hold position to ensure that the skipping is not triggered by an unwanted key press. But the problem persisted. Sometimes there was white noise when skipping tracks.

It seems to me that rockbox now and then "forgets" to fill the playback buffer and the codec runs out of data, reads "old" data and continues playing.

[nieroster]

I've tried Steve Bavin's build (061004-1733) today as suggested in bugreport #6117 but the problem described above remains.

I was playing 192kbit/s mp3 files from a directory (dynamic playlist) for about 15 minutes and pffffffft it skipped back in the middle of a track.

Although yesterday  it was playing for 3 quartes of an hour without a skip.