Has anybody tried connecting the gear to a managed switch then checking the stats on there ? The Denon interfaces connect at 100MB rather than a gig. The bottle neck might be at the network.
The type of switch used will have zero effect on playback glitches, as the track is entirely buffered in player memory rather than the way old Pro Link works. It’s also why there’s a 270MB limit on tracks over the Engine Connect linking network.
You could disconnect the network or even drive and still play the loaded track. It’s possible that handling the drive or network stuff at all is causing problems, but that would again be independent on the quality of the drive or switch, and rather more a matter of whether a drive or network connected is causing problems at all. In other words, if using a streaming service without and instead of a drive or Engine Connect linking has no drop outs, then that might tell you something about which processes are causing the interruptions.
Honestly, some of your issues look like some of the anomalies we experienced upon Prime’s initial release.
Thank you for your reply. I agree that the switch isn’t the problem in this scenario.
One thing to note (I illustrates it in the diagram in my latest video post), the deck that experienced the audio dropout is the primary device with an internal SSD.
You might want to get a streaming service set up, even one of the free trials for a few months like Tidal, and try it with a hard line network connection to remove WiFi as a variable, and mix with it without drives connected at all (or at least don’t select one that’s connected) so that you get the pop up message that hot cues and such won’t be saved. I’d be interested how frequently you have stutters and drop outs in such a set up.
Oh, that reminds me of a glitch I discovered last night where it kept resetting my selected sample rate download quality after I was testing the lowest rate for preview speed. I had this feeling I was forgetting one of the things I noticed.
The first thing I would do is turn off the motors to eliminate this element, because the jog’s micro freezes can lead to this. the next reason could be beatinfo and stagelinq running somewhere. i read the discussion in discord, i advise to turn off the stagelinq client, this can be a problem, at least for me it sometimes led to problems when I experimented with it
I really appreciate you leaning in and replying so quickly .
Wifi and all non-essential services are disabled on all decks. I was even warned that wifi was disabled when first booting up 3.10.0, chuckled at the screen, and kept it disabled.
If streaming is anything like how it’s done with Engine DJ, then I am definitely going to hate it. With engine DJ, the entire track has to be downloaded and preview is not available.
You can preview, it’s just at the same speed as the whole layer download to play it on the deck as it has to get the entire file container. If you currently preview a track that you then load to the layer, it doesn’t download it again.
I actually had no idea that Engine DJ Desktop app had streaming from online services. Is that for preparation or something? I go into the Tidal app and start browsing for stuff, find a track I like, tell it to make a radio station playlist from it, and that’s about it. I have a lot of other peoples’ playlists hearted too, so I have a ton of playlists in my collection, which is why I put in a feature request to make scrolling them faster and easier.
I’m on fiber optic over a hard ethernet line to the X18xx mixer, so my download speed is a couple seconds at Hifi lossless 44.1 FLAC quality and a split second if I use 96kbps Normal, which is why I made that feature request to separate preview and the actual layer loading.
I will say that with a drive in use to save streaming services’ hot cues and such, my Prime players were never very consistent with being glitch free, but I haven’t ventured to try that in some time. This is also the reason why I would like NTFS read-only support and a general read-only player utility/preferences option for all drives you connect that would give you a similar pop up to using a streaming service with no drive connected warning you.
We saw the same issue on the Gemini MDJs I beta tested for them, which resulted in them adding a No Analysis option for me to narrow down what was causing issues, but they also had NTFS read-only support from the beginning. I suspect at least some of the corrupted drives and playback glitches on Prime are likely caused by all the back and forth drive writes and network activity… complex systems breed glitches.
StageLinq is used to communicate between players, if you disable it, then nothing will work at all. I meant “now playing” and similar apps (for example your prototype for OBS) that use this protocol for their needs
these programs not only listen to messages from players, but also exchange some messages with them. because all this is not an official implementation, and the protocol may not be 100% followed, which can cause problems, for example, software reconnects can cause friezes
OK! Thank you for this note. I had a feeling it was a passive client. Do you know if these are UDP broadcasts? I imagine it would be to keep it as light weight as possible.
I tested with an External Samsung T5 to see if there are any differences, and overall using external storage is slower for me.
That said, the only way I could get my setup to be somewhat stable is by using two primary devices (below). This is less than optimal, but at least it’s relatively stable.
Even in this configuration, the following things still occur:
Previewing tracks can cause the devices to freeze
Sometimes loading playlists freezes the UI
Deck playing may lose sync lock and/or audio will warble
.
