Songs Freeze during Playback

[ToneDeF]

I'm another Rockbox user suffering from the "playback freezing half way through the song" problem.  I began having the problem back on Tuesday or Wednesday (I update my build of Rockbox almost every day).  My player is a Sansa 280R with microSD card.  I've only been playing MP3 files from an m3u playlist.  My playback settings include resume bookmarks, track shuffle, and bass/treble adjustments.

I'm guessing that the freeze may be related to a buffering problem.

Does Rockbox dump error messages to a log file anywhere?  I would post the log file if someone could tell me where to find it.

[cocopugg]

The problem is definitely real (at least on my Sansa e280), and apparently inherent to the latest build. I don't know if a formal bug report has been made, but I assume they'll be working on trying to correct it on a future build.

[pondlife]

If it's still a problem with r15409 or later, I'd suggest you report this on the bug tracker, rather than here.  When in the "frozen" state it might be useful to go to the Debug > Buffering Thread screen and include all the displayed values on your bug report.

Beyond that you need to build a "logf" build, which will produce a log that you can save into a file.  Let me know if you'd like me to make one for you.

pondlife

[amm888]

happened to me today with the 15409 build. if it happens again to me today i'll try and check the debug values as pondlife suggested.

---

well it happened again so i went to the buffering thread, and before i could copy anything down it mysteriously began to play again (not the song it was stuck on)

[ToneDeF]

Pondlife, please do create a logf build of the current build.  Many of us users are interested in helping the developers troubleshoot problems.

I updated to the latest build at 11:00 AM EDT today and the freezing problem still exists.  This time, the song froze 11 seconds into playing (0:11 / 8:56).  I noticed that the freeze happened just after the title of the next track was displayed (right after the "Next: ?" field on my Now Playing screen changed to "Next: Title_Of_Next_Track" -- i.e. the '?' character was replaced).

I had turned on replay-gain (track on shuffle, prevent clipping) for this playing session.

While the playback was frozen, I copied down the following info:

==
Debug Buffering thread:

pcm: 0/529200
alloc: 22410752/27950208
real: 332544/27950208
usefl: 11296/27950208
data_rem: 30167552
track count: 4
handle count: 8
cpu freq: 30MHz
boost ratio: 0%
pcmbufdesc: 0/21
==
Core and stack usage:

Idle(0): 0%
Idle(1): 53%
0: (0) *R 4 54% main
1: (0)   S 4 5% scroll
2: (0)   B 6 3% usb
3: (0)   S 6 13% backlight
4: (0)   S 6 30% power
5: (0)   T 6 77% ata/sd
6: (0)   T 8 11% tagcache
7: (0)   S 4 93% codec
8: (0)   T 8 74% audio
9: (0)   B 4 21% voice code
10: (0) T 4 20% buffering
11: (0) B 4 2% pcmrec
12: ---
13: ---
14: ---
15: ---
16: ---

[Chronon]

As pondlife said, someone should file a bug report to flyspray (the "bug reports" link).  This will get more attention from developers than posting to a forum topic.  

[bloodbath]

Do you need to register to enter bugs on Flyspray?

[GodEater]

Yes.

[saratoga]

I contacted Nico_P on IRC about this yesterday.  Evidently the MOB patch makes an assumption about the ATA setup that does not hold because of the odd way the Sansa's flash is organized.  As a result, the encoded audio buffer never refills and playback simply stops when it empties.

[cocopugg]

I contacted Nico_P on IRC about this yesterday.  Evidently the MOB patch makes an assumption about the ATA setup that does not hold because of the odd way the Sansa's flash is organized.  As a result, the encoded audio buffer never refills and playback simply stops when it empties.

Thanks for the update, Saratoga. Is the problem going to be addressed and corrected in a future build?

[GodEater]

Of course! We don't just get bugs reported and then leave them!

[cocopugg]

You guys are doing a great job. ROCKbox rules!

[ToneDeF]

I posted a bug report on Flyspray for this:

FS#8081 - Playback stops on Sansa before the song has finished

[cocopugg]

I wonder how long it'll take to fix that bug?

[saratoga]

Seems to be fixed.