Mosaic - why do I get pauses during playback of Tidal and Qobuz

Support
1

Been using the DCS bridge for about six months and find that it really improves sound quality.

But recently I have started experiencing pauses of between 3 to 10 seconds in track whilst using Mosaic for both Tidal and Qobuz for any type of file. Playback resumes from the point that it stopped. After another 5 to 10 minutes comes another pause and so it carries on.

If I switch to BubbleUPNP the problem disappears. The problem doesn’t occur if I stream locally from a Melco. I am running Mosaic on Android.

I am using the latest version of Mosaic.

Any ideas as I would prefer to use Mosaic?

2

This type of problem seems always to be resolved by ensuring that the settings of your router/switch are configured correctly. I would suggest that you look through the various threads here concerning similar problems ( there seem to be one or two a week) to see if they provide you with any ideas.

A new version of Mosaic ( v1.1.1) is promised shortly and there are indications that it may also help to deal with the issue.

3

My settings work perfectly well with BubbleUPNP. When is the new version of Mosaic likely to appear?

4

dCS no longer provide target dates for software revision releases. The best information we have dates from 10th of this month and is from Andrew who is in charge of such things for streaming:

“The discovery code has been completely re-written in Mosaic 1.1.1 (coming soon).”

5

Just to be sure, are you saying that, e.g. playing back a particular track via Mosaic/Tidal results in random pauses during playback, but that same track played back via BubbleUPnP/Tidal is error free?

That would be very strange - both Mosaic and BubbleUPnP are really just Control Points, meaning they help you find and select tracks/albums but don’t affect the eventual streaming itself. Once you select and start playing a track, the Network Bridge streams the track directly from Tidal. So track playback performance should actually be identical regardless of which control point App you use.

You might want to double check the exact problem you’re experiencing.

6

Yes this is correct. I know it’s odd but that’s what happens when I use Mosaic as a CP. I am still seeing the problem even after upgrading to 1.1.1 and installing the latest board upgrade (504 I believe). The bridge is connected directly to the router via an EE switch which I believe is unmanaged. I will investigate router options but it’s a fairly limited being a 4G router.

7

I saw something reported elsewhere on the forum that Mosaic uses different Tidal servers. Is this still the case? What about Qobuz? Local playback is unaffected thankfully as I have just finished ripping 3000 CD’s.

8

I doubt that Tidal has special servers for Mosaic - why would they, how would they know?. Qobuz uses different servers for the USA and the service to European countries. We do not know where you are situated.

As I said in September, you are most likely ( read as “certainly”) have a problem with your network. If that were not the case this forum would be flooded with people complaining about 3 - 10 second gaps on two completely different streaming services. It is just you.

Please tell us where you are and what your setup feeding Tidal and Qobuz to your system is especially the brand and model of router. EE switch - do you mean English Electric?

9

Spent part of the afternoon poking around on my Network Bridge (NwB). Turns out this is actually an interesting little “problem”, that likely points to mainly your Internet Service/Router as the likely culprit.

Tidal use 3 caching Services globally; Akamai, AWS CloudFront, and Fastly Edge Cloud. On my system at home, depending on whether I use Mosaic or BubbleUPnP, the NwB points to a different Tidal caching server :astonished: (may not be the case for everyone all the time).

With Mosaic, Tidal album searches happen through airable.io, but once an album or track is selected, the NwB establishes a direct TLS connection to a Fastly cache for streaming of that album/track. The nearest fastly cache to me is located in the U.S! (Fortunately, my ISP has fat pipes to the internet globally, and I have no problems streaming from US sources).

When I use Bubble UPnP though, Tidal album searches happen through BubbleUPnP itself (proxy’ed back into Tidal), and when an album or track is selected, the NwB establishes a direct TLS connection to a CloudFront cache (in my country).

In your case, I’m guessing your ISP/4G Router for whatever reasons, has issues to whichever Tidal cache Mosaic points your NwB to!

Here’s possibly a quick way to check - connect a PC/Mac (with WiFi disabled) to the same Ethernet switch that your NwB is connected to. Once you’ve got your Internet connection on that PC/Mac up and running, get to a command line window and issue the following 3 commands, one after another;

ping -c 5 sp-pr-ak.audio.tidal.com

ping -c 5 sp-pr-cf.audio.tidal.com

ping -c 5 sp-pr-fa.audio.tidal.com

(ak = Akamai. cf =CloudFront. fa = Fastly).

After each command, you should see a result summary that looks like this;

--- sp-pr-cf.audio.tidal.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.504/11.882/16.509/4.102 ms

One (or more?) of the results will likely show a high round-trip latency, and possibly some significant packet loss %. You should take that info and ask your ISP to help you resolve or improve the performance.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes :crossed_fingers:t2: :grin:

5 Likes
10

Tried your suggestion in Windows. I am not seeing any packet loss but the ping time ranges from 35 to 150mS across all three servers. Don’t know if this is high or not! BBC News is about the same so perhaps that is typical for my setup. I am not seeing what you are seeing though. Is there a similar test for Qobuz? Thank you for the info.

11

Never ceases to amaze me the wealth of knowledge on this forum. I learn something new every time I come on here.

12

The usual astounding depth of knowledge and analysis that we have all come to expect from you. What a valuable resource you are :smiley:

13

Thanks @Gardenman,@PAR, it’s always fun trying to help resolve an issue as it often uncovers something new. :smiley:

If your ping round-trip delay time (RTD) is as much as 150ms, thats probably not a good sign - as a point of reference, I can ping literally half-way across the planet and its under 100ms RTD typically. It’s possible your streams are suffering from significant packet jitter ultimately resulting in buffer underruns, but I’d be mostly just guessing at this stage without more details.

Qobuz on dCS/Mosaic works very similarly to how it does with Tidal. As far as I can tell though, Qobuz only use a single global caching Service; AWS CloudFront.

Are you experiencing the exact same issue with Qobuz where Mosaic Control driven streams stutter while BubbleUPnP ones don’t?

Maybe you might want to check that your DNS is configured correctly - ideally to your local ISP’s DNS server, for both your Router and consequentially your NwB - because the way global Caching services like AWS CloudFront work is to use the DNS resolution service to provide clients with geolocation dependent host IP address responses (sometimes called “Geolocation Routing” or “Geoproximity routing”).

So for example, if you’re based in the UK, when your NwB tries to resolve streaming-std.qobuz.com (Qobuz’ Caching service hostname), your local DNS would return the IP address of an AWS’ UK based CloudFront server in London. Whereas someone in the US would have that exact same hostname DNS revolve to an IP address of an AWS CloudFront server based in the U.S.

14

I’ve re-tried the ping test today on both Tidal and Qobuz hostnames without making any router changes and I’m getting response times that are under 50ms so it’s better than it was yesterday. I was using the system last night and didn’t experience any dropouts.

I don’t see any issues with any other CP’s except when using Mosaic. But you have said that BubbleUPnP links to a caching server in my country whereas Mosaic probably doesn’t. Unless I’ve misunderstood that point.

I will experiment with different DNS.

15

After a long and fruitless battle with this problem I have now sold the Network Bridge and replaced it with something that works. Thank you for your support.