Hey all, my music that is playing off of a HDD in my unRaid server skips about 50% of the time when I copy files to my server. This is regardless of weather the files are copying to the same disk as the music or a different disk in the array. I have noticed the issue from two different computers.

 

I'm new to unRaid and I'm pretty sure this is NOT supposed to happen, but I can understand why it WOULD happen. That said, music should be a very small read for the array and I have even increased the buffer in my music program (foobar2000) to help with network skipping issues. It doesn't seem to do much for my unRaid skips.

 

unRaid 4.7

6 drives, no cache drive

gigabit LAN connection to all hardwired devices/computers

 

 

Attached is a syslog

syslog.txt

I had a similar problem with movies skipping when the hourly backup of one of my machines occurred to a different share and disk. I changed the backup share from user to disk and the problem stopped. It turns out that the backup disk was failing and has since been replaced. I haven't changed the backup disk share back to a user share. I suggest you get SMART reports on all disks involved and post them here.

I get that now and then when a disk is spun down. Any chance that's involved? I usually notice it with video, so somewhat higher bandwidth requirements. It seems to mostly happen if the disk spinning up is on the same controller as the one with the playing media, but I haven't run thorough tests yet. If it's a movie night I've just set my spin-down timers to never and the problem is avoided for that time.

I experience the same thing.  Unfortunately it is a Windows problem, not an unRAID problem.  I remember when I asked this same question many moons ago the response was something about a Big Kernel Lock, but I don't remember the details.  Simply put, there's nothing that LimeTech can do about it.  If you use another OS (MacOS, Linux, etc) you won't have the same problem.  For example, I can stream music off my XBMC (linux based) HTPC with no skipping no matter what else the server is doing (even something IO heavy, like seeding hundreds of torrents).

 

Nevermind, apparently the above is wrong.  I've had a lot of success using MediaMonkey on Windows, you might want to give that a try.  Every other music player seems to skip from time to time.

Yeah, MediaMonkey rocks when you have lots of music files. 

Check to see if Windows Live Assistant installed, it can cause problems from what I have read (see here).

 

If I were you I would do some google searching on the above mentioned Windows Live Assistant related stuff and see if it leads you anywhere.