Latest 4.1.0 - RDairplay ignores level while playout voicetracks and mutes prev. track

[RudiOnTheAir]

How to explain??

Made a one hour show for this evening with the voicetracker.

Like it to play it for recording via Jackd and audacity. So i got notice of it. When a music tracks ends, the vt begins for example 10 seconds before track end, the audio of ending track should run with 100% volume until its end. Thats where i make my mod..

In the voicetracker gui it looks and sounds good, but while playing out in rdairplay the audio of ending tracks got muted, so my mod is a little bit "dry" That happens also with old logs from years ago.. Seems to be an error in rdairplay..

Fyi. It takes some seconds until audio fades away. Don't realy know why...

Btw. I used as workaround the render funktion, to get the show ready. There is not this effect..

Any hints..?

Cheers

Rüdiger

[alexolivan]

Hi... I've noticed quite a few 'weird' behavior on the engine lately. The thing is that, since I use a testing VM for long time, and it's full jackd, no hardware, and now there's a lot of folks going v4 to give feed back on it, I've somehow less active on tests, so I'm unable to accurately tell at what commit the things start happening :-/

What I noticed first is that the virtual audio mixer/router 'leaks' ... I can linsten RDAirplay, very very faint, out of my RDLibrary 'cue' output, from time to time...it seems to go off upon cart switch/transition on the log machine, but often, after a brief moment, the 'leak' reappears.

Also, listening some of my podcasts (recordings + uploads) , I've noticed transitions (segueing, fade-down, fade-up) very odd. Sometimes it goes OK and I listen smooth transitions, but often transitions are harsh, like if something goes wrong with the marks or the audio engine.

Finally, I've to check what hapens with my GTS pips (I use my rivendell VM as a clock at home, routing RDCatchd playout down to speakers) wich I'm playing-out as RDCatchd events, since I've notice I don't hear them anymore lately. Last week I let RDcatch opened and I saw the plyout deck hung in a playing state, but since I was doing my routine weekly memory-leak rivendell restart, I didn't figure out what happened.

But yes, at least under VM/jackd scenario, I've noticed quite an overall weirdness lately on the playout engine.

Cheers.

[RudiOnTheAir]

I mean is has nothing to do with VM or not. I've played my last show on my Proxmox VE Server with dummy device to stream encoder, and on my physical system, but with jackd too. Both with the same effect.

Btw. Did you ever tried to use pipewire instead of jackd?

[alexolivan]

Btw. Did you ever tried to use pipewire instead of jackd?

Nope... I know it's the future, but I've not tried it.

[RudiOnTheAir]

It would be nice, if the rivendell services could present their ports to pipewire. I've tried to disable jackd in rdadmin and start rd without jackd, hoped that rd can use the firewire jack implementation. But i had no luck.. So what. Wait and see...

[RudiOnTheAir]

I made two short videos. Once in the voice tracker, and the same log in the RDairplay. I don't know if I could have set something wrong??! By the way, in the voice tracker you can see the inaccuracy between what you hear and the green playback position line. Running RD 4.10 (Repo by Alex), Debian 12, Jackd. USB Soundinterface.

https://cloud.schwoon.info/s/4S72q2aKcEMXgiQ

[RudiOnTheAir]

Hello. Do I understand correctly that the problem only occurs with me? Hasn't anyone else noticed anything except Alex?? ;)

Ruediger

[alexolivan]

Hi! Notice that (me for sure, I feel you too) we're using jackd and, overall, doing things in an 'unusual' way for a production environment (the 'geek' way :-P). Also my impresion (just my personal one) is that, the bulk of production users that upgraded from v3 to v4 are more 'forum / mailing-list' users (groups.io) rather than 'source repository' users (github)... and most of the activity there is more 'genaral-usage' related... I don't expect certain issues to be spoted by tha mainstream of Rivendell users.

I long time ago realized that, to certain degree (so not absolutelly!), Rivendell is (as we call here) a 'classic' radio playout (not what we call an automation) system, meant to integrate on classic broadcasting environment: Hardware audio interfaces (AudioScience, which are fantastic cards) , hardware audio switchers/routers and stuff like that... often RS-232 driven (I had my hand on several old Broadcast-Tools stuff which worked really nice with Rivendell on my tests years ago!!!), hardware audio encoding/decoding, hardware/satellite ad-block/sync receivers, etc, etc... XLR/AES cables everywhere (although there's an interesting Livewire option there for the US.. Europe is more Dante / Ravenna), etc etc ... which I find very 'retro', and Linux, and OpenSource.. andI love it!!! I'm even using Airplay reports and RDLogEdit reports to feed data daily into my emulated 80's MVS IBM Mainframe :-P ... everything so 80s/90s :-D

But if you're on a real production environment, and still you want to use Rivendell, my advice is that you switch to 'iron / legacy' environment or a proven/supported Livewire solution. Using known to work / documented ASI cards, switchers, etc, etc. I would also stick to 'supported' OS and version (I think its Ubuntu Studio) and official repo for the software.

BTW, If you look at the branches, you'll notice a few new ones :-D !!! , and one is about a rework on the audio engine (which I feel it is a major undertake!) with what I perceive are major changes (switching from TCP to UDP and quite a lot of re-work... maybe I'm wrong) ... so, as always, something is going on here, and I'm sure we'll have our hands on testing stuff soon :-)

Cheers!

[RudiOnTheAir]

Hi..

Did you watch the video? At the moment the playout is unusable if you have previously used the voice tracker. I use Rivendell in the context of a non-commercial radio program that is broadcast once a week. And I always use the latest release, also to participate in the development and to give something back... But at the moment it becomes difficult when core functions suddenly no longer work. I don't really know what I'm going to do now.

[alexolivan]

Yep... I saw them... it is very interesting and, clearly, shows something is amiss there. Sadly, as I told earlier, I didn't track the point (commit) where I noticed something went amiss on the playout stuff (at some point, I took a look, since I use Ardour as a 'virtual mixing table' fed from Rivendell's jackd outputs, and I could visually see audio 'leaking' to wrong otputs, missing audio outputs from RDCatch, etc... while, for instance GTS pips are actually recorded in my scheduled recordings... so overall, something went wrong at some time, because it worked very well before)

Just in case you have not played with AudioScience cards (I know them somehow well under Linux, since I programmed a nodeJS API to interfeace with ASI/ALSA driver) they feature internal audio mixing and routing capabilities, that allows you to route/mix audio to/from both physical and PCM peers internally... well, once Fred told me Rivendell makes use of that feature transparently to end-users, so maybe it is possible that for ASI driven systems the problems you (we) are experiencing goes completelly unnoticed. Also many users do use external audio routing / switching by means of Rivendell handling external audio switchers / and routers... not to mention that there're still users that do have RDAirplay configured in a way where cards are played alternating two distinct audio outputs, so mixing is done, again, entirelly externally by other means. In any of such cases, an internal audio engine problem would probably ever be noticed to the end-user, with airing working flawlessly.

[RudiOnTheAir]

Well okay. As long as I can still work with the workaround of rendering the finished log, I can help myself. And I will continue testing the packages from your repo. Hoping that at some point it will work like it did before. I will never switch to an MS Windows solution. Then I'd rather put on records again. ;)

[alexolivan]

I will never switch to an MS Windows solution. Then I'd rather put on records again. ;)

LoL!

[RudiOnTheAir]

So, today I took advantage of the rainy afternoon and installed the "Maintainer" edition with Mint 21 as the OS (via Installerscript), imported the database and /var/snd. The whole thing on the server in a virtual machine and on the audio workstation with a USB audio interface. And what should I say? The playout problems have disappeared. I'll test the voice tracker tomorrow. I'm wondering what's different with Debian 12? Very strange.!

[glenndrives]

We will be moving to mint xfce for our v4 systems.

Easy to use and works well.

Glenn L. Hickman Jr.

Director, Radio Frequency Engineering

[WHRO Public Media]https://www.whro.org/

5200 Hampton Boulevard | Norfolk, VA 23508 P:757-575-5064 whro.orghttp://whro.org

-------- Original message -------- From: RudiOnTheAir @.> Date: 10/6/23 16:11 (GMT-05:00) To: ElvishArtisan/rivendell @.> Cc: Subscribed @.***> Subject: Re: [ElvishArtisan/rivendell] Latest 4.1.0 - RDairplay ignores level while playout voicetracks and mutes prev. track (Issue #911)

So, today I took advantage of the rainy afternoon and installed the "Maintainer" edition with Mint 21 as the OS (via Installerscript), imported the database and /var/snd. The whole thing on the server in a virtual machine and on the audio workstation with a USB audio interface. And what should I say? The playout problems have disappeared. I'll test the voice tracker tomorrow. I'm wondering what's different with Debian 12? Very strange.!

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ElvishArtisan/rivendell/issues/911#issuecomment-1751352141, or unsubscribehttps://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABUZXEEMSI6LXLGFPCTGAL3X6BQXJAVCNFSM6AAAAAA4RPHRZ6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTONJRGM2TEMJUGE. You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: @.***>

Get local news from WHRO every weekday in your inbox. Sign up today!https://support.whro.org/journalism-enews-optin#/