Playback stutter for online stream

[glaslos]

First of all, great library, got it to play audio in no time! I'm using an ESP32, the VS1053 is from LC Technology. I would like to play an online stream. To do so, I open a socket and pass it to the player.play function. This works fine and plays the stream as expected, but I get a stutter here an there. I assume the 32 byte buffer might be a bit too small with the network overhead. Changing the length of the buffer causes the VS to garble the audio. I assume the driver is expecting a 32 bytes array and this can't be changed?

[peterhinch]

I assume you are using the synchronous version. The fact that buf is defined as an arg to play is a MicroPython "trick" which causes the compiler to pre-allocate the buffer. It isn't an invitation to change the size, which is fixed in the device hardware.

I never experimented with online streams. A possible approach might be to use the asynchronous version. A task might maintain a double bytearray buffer of suitably large size to cope with variations in network performance. A second task would wait until the buffers were full before feeding the player.

I would avoid the "obvious" approach of using my Queue primitive: this isn't a very efficient way of dealing with bytes.

You should be able to use the stream mechanism for reading the data prior to populating the buffers.

An interesting project.

[peterhinch]

Closed due to inactivity.