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balena-io-experimental / balena-sound

Build a single or multi-room streamer for an existing audio device using a Raspberry Pi! Supports Bluetooth, Airplay and Spotify Connect
https://balena.io/blog/turn-your-old-speakers-or-hi-fi-into-bluetooth-receivers-using-only-a-raspberry-pi/
MIT License
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Airplay huge audio delay #127

Closed thep18 closed 4 years ago

thep18 commented 4 years ago

Hi everyone,

New to the forum. I've been using BalenaSound through Airplay on a Rasp4 for a few months and everything worked fine except a noticeable audio delay (-2000ms) that I used to manually correct every time I wanted to watch a movie or something. I recently updated to the latest version of the OS (2.48.0+rev1) and of the Supervisor (10.8.0), now the audio delay is almost double (I'm at -3700ms). I tried turning off all the services I'm not using (BT, Spotify) with no luck. I also tried turning off the new Snapcast and Fleet Supervisor services but when I do nothing works.

I tried to install back a version of the OS but the bigger audio delay is still here.

Any ideas?

Thank a mil for the help!

AedanBarr commented 4 years ago

I am also having this problem. I just use Spotify until this is solved.

tmigone commented 4 years ago

Hello, @thep18, changing balenaOS version won't do much as the added delay is most likely due to the inclusion of snapcast for multi-room feature. You can disable it and see if it helps: https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound/#multi-room

thep18 commented 4 years ago

That did it for me. I'm back with the -2000ms delay that I'm used to. Thanks @tmigone

Any idea on how to fix that now ahah?

tmigone commented 4 years ago

Glad to know that helped!

About the 2000ms or so delay, in the case of AirPlay that is actually a design choice made by the library author. You can read more about it here but the gist of it is that the delay is required to avoid sync problems over the network.

With regards to multi-room delay, adding that feature requires the usage of SnapCast (or a different audio server). That unfortunately has the side effect of added streaming delay. We've decided this is an acceptable tradeoff to have multi-room, specially since you can always disable it. That being said, we are always interested in making this project better. I'm personally looking into a few enhancements that could improve this and other performance issues we've been seeing. I haven't got the time yet to try them out but will do so shortly.

I'll close this issue since I don't think we can do much about it other than the recommendations I already gave. Feel free to reopen or create new issues if required! Cheers and thanks for the feedback.

thep18 commented 3 years ago

Aaaand I'm back. I've downgraded my Rasp4 to a Rasp3B+, and upgraded Balena to 2.60.1+rev1 with the Supervisor Version at 11.14.0. I kept the multi-room disabled, along with the services I don't use (BT, Spotify, upnp) and I don't know what to do with the new "audio" service, but if I turn it off nothing works. I'm at -2400ms of delay and don't know how to work my way back to -2000ms (which was a sweet spot where YouTube used to sync automatically). Any ideas on what changed? Thanks