[SOLVED] moOde 9.0.5 and 9.0.7: Adding radio station to playlist does not work

[kurt1970]

Half a day later... The problem is back!

Now, I've a wired connection, which is stable.

In addition, I did some more deep dive testing on my other instance - I thought worked - and came to the conclusion I've the same issue on 2 different instances.

Both instances are on the same switch. No packet loss.

It can't be coincidence I've the issue on 2 different moode instances....

Afterall, it's easy to reproduce:
1) create a new playlist "Test"
2) Go to the radio station view and randomly select a radio station via the 3 dots and add it to the "Test" playlist
3) Goto 2). After a number of tries, this will fail

And when it fails, keep on trying. After a nr of retries it will pass.

@Tim Curtis, @TheOldPresbyope, @Nutul: you've a PM with a 2' video showing what happens.

[TheOldPresbyope]

Aw, rats. I woke up all set to post a brilliant argument on the reasons I thought a poor WiFi connection was unlikely to be the culprit, given the symptoms you describe. Too late, you've already established that for yourself.  

I can't argue with your video but I can't repro your problem either. After adding a dozen radio stations to a new playlist without a single hitch, I quit to eat a late breakfast (and make another pot of coffee).

Time to reduce the test system to a bare minimum: flash moOde to a uSD card rather than a USB-SSD and don't configure any music sources or do any other configuring save, perhaps, setting up a WiFi interface again. If the problem still shows up then we have a real conundrum on our hands.

Regards,
Kent

BTW - the systems I tested on included moOde 9.0.5 on RPi 3A+, RPi 4B, RPi 5B, each connected via either wireless or wired interface to an ISP-provided cable modem/router/access point (Xfinity is the ISP). All Pis boot from either uSD card or USB thumbddrive. My music server is OpenMediaVault running on an Odroid HC1 board. The server and wired Pis are connected to an old Netgear GS108 8-port switch which is connected to the router via powerline networking. Weird, perhaps, but it's what you do with what you got.

[kurt1970]

Aw, rats. I woke up all set to post a brilliant argument on the reasons I thought a poor WiFi connection was unlikely to be the culprit, given the symptoms you describe. Too late, you've already established that for yourself.  

I can't argue with your video but I can't repro your problem either. After adding a dozen radio stations to a new playlist without a single hitch, I quit to eat a late breakfast (and make another pot of coffee).

Time to reduce the test system to a bare minimum: flash moOde to a uSD card rather than a USB-SSD and don't configure any music sources or do any other configuring save, perhaps, setting up a WiFi interface again. If the problem still shows up then we have a real conundrum on our hands.

Regards,
Kent

BTW - the systems I tested on included moOde 9.0.5 on RPi 3A+, RPi 4B, RPi 5B, each connected via either wireless or wired interface to an ISP-provided cable modem/router/access point (Xfinity is the ISP). All Pis boot from either uSD card or USB thumbddrive. My music server is OpenMediaVault running on an Odroid HC1 board. The server and wired Pis are connected to an old Netgear GS108 8-port switch which is connected to the router via powerline networking. Weird, perhaps, but it's what you do with what you got.

Hi Kent,

Here it's 17h00. So, the coffee is over and we're on the wine.

I'm not a fan of WL, but I don't have the patience to make an Eth cable, more specific, putting the wires in the connector.
But... My wife (yes, read again!) my wife loves making Eth cables. She's a nurse... No further questions...  

As we speak, I'm setting up a 3B+ using wireless, close enough to the WL. Actually, in my real life environment, I've a netgear swiitch connected to one of the Eth ports of my WL router.  On the switch I've only audio devices: the 2 moOde instances and a NAS, well basically a PI sharing a SMB share.

Wrt the SSDs: they're from a different brand, and I actually went for SSD as this is much more reliable then µSD. Note that moOde runs here at least 14h a day...

Keep you posted!

[TheOldPresbyope]

Aw, rats. I woke up all set to post a brilliant argument on the reasons I thought a poor WiFi connection was unlikely to be the culprit, given the symptoms you describe. Too late, you've already established that for yourself.  

I can't argue with your video but I can't repro your problem either. After adding a dozen radio stations to a new playlist without a single hitch, I quit to eat a late breakfast (and make another pot of coffee).

Time to reduce the test system to a bare minimum: flash moOde to a uSD card rather than a USB-SSD and don't configure any music sources or do any other configuring save, perhaps, setting up a WiFi interface again. If the problem still shows up then we have a real conundrum on our hands.

Regards,
Kent

BTW - the systems I tested on included moOde 9.0.5 on RPi 3A+, RPi 4B, RPi 5B, each connected via either wireless or wired interface to an ISP-provided cable modem/router/access point (Xfinity is the ISP). All Pis boot from either uSD card or USB thumbddrive. My music server is OpenMediaVault running on an Odroid HC1 board. The server and wired Pis are connected to an old Netgear GS108 8-port switch which is connected to the router via powerline networking. Weird, perhaps, but it's what you do with what you got.

Hi Kent,

Here it's 17h00. So, the coffee is over and we're on the wine.

I'm not a fan of WL, but I don't have the patience to make an Eth cable, more specific, putting the wires in the connector.
But... My wife (yes, read again!) my wife loves making Eth cables. She's a nurse... No further questions...  

As we speak, I'm setting up a 3B+ using wireless, close enough to the WL. Actually, in my real life environment, I've a netgear swiitch connected to one of the Eth ports of my WL router.  On the switch I've only audio devices: the 2 moOde instances and a NAS, well basically a PI sharing a SMB share.

Wrt the SSDs: they're from a different brand, and I actually went for SSD as this is much more reliable then µSD. Note that moOde runs here at least 14h a day...

Keep you posted!

We finished off the wine watching the Olympics last night.  

In theory*, perhaps, SSD is more reliable than uSD, but I've never had a uSD card go bad in service (not the same as having sketchy no-brand cards, which I learned to discard out of hand, or clumsily breaking one). The point here is to reduce your system to an absolutely minimum testable product.

I have two moOde players running 24/7, one for headset listening and the other in our sunroom ATM driving a Sonos Move speaker system via BT. That arrangement was to be temporary when we moved here 2+ years ago but I've been slow to pick out a small class-D amp and bookshelf speakers---too many choices!

Regards,
Kent

*In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

[kurt1970]

Hi Kent,

Tbh, I've never had an issue with µSD cards. I've a PI B (I guess?) where I've written some software to control the heating and access to the house (via a keypad). It's running 24/7 since 2014! Once a year, I proactively replace the SD card. Reason is that in my team, we had a demo running on PI3B+, where SD cards went corrupt frequiently (at least, this is what they told me )

Back on topic: I did a fresh install on a SD card and did the test 100x (glad there is the wine! ). Everything went ok!.

Now, I'll restore my WL config as I've on the SSD, and see what happens.

Keep you posted!

[kurt1970]

Hi Kent,

Ok. So, I restored my confg on µSD similar to what I've on SSD via a Restore. On µSD, everything seems to be ok. Great!

I put the SD card in the PI4 and I'm facing the same issue as before.

This is WL. I'll move it to a wired setup.

Keep you posted! (the bottle is empty :-( )

[kurt1970]

I restored my wired config, and I'm facing the same issue as the movie I post to you.

To summarize: After importing my config, I've the same issue on 2 PI4s, a PI3, using SSD and µSD.

Clearly, it looks like the restore of a config (mine is dating from the 8.x version) is breaking things. And yes, I customized a lot of things, not looking forward to re-enter this from scratch.

I thought, maybe there is an issiue with the former playlst format.. So, I added the Q to a new PL. Next was adding a radio station to that PL. Ir failed

[TheOldPresbyope]

Argh. I don't understand why bad WiFi connectivity causes only this obscure problem and doesn't interfere with other functions, but that's just me.

As Tim suggested before, post the output of the ifconfig command; as well post the output of the iwconfig command. If your laptop is connected wirelessly post the same for it (sorry, don't know the equivalent commands for MS Windows or Apple MacOS).

Regards,
Kent

[kurt1970]

Here you go:

moode@moode:~ $ ifconfig
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
       inet 192.168.1.202  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255
       inet6 fe80::c119:6001:82e1:f9f0  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
       ether dc:a6:32:ea:3a:32  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
       RX packets 74283  bytes 104579044 (99.7 MiB)
       RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
       TX packets 39653  bytes 11663756 (11.1 MiB)
       TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
       inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
       inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
       loop  txqueuelen 1000  (Local Loopback)
       RX packets 2736  bytes 437203 (426.9 KiB)
       RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
       TX packets 2736  bytes 437203 (426.9 KiB)
       TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

from my Win machine:
C:\Users\KLEFEVRE>ping 192.168.1.202

Pinging 192.168.1.202 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.202: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.202: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.202: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.202: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.202:
   Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
   Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 2ms, Average = 1ms

But I repeat: Adding the station to the playing Q, and saving the Q to a PL works!
What doens't work is adding the station straight to a Q.

Trust me, if you use SW 14/7, you know what works and what doesn't...
$/€ doesnt say everything, but for me, music is everything. I'm using moOde in a 110k€ system and a 12k€ system.

[kurt1970]

Ths keeps me awake, but I made some progress! and I believe I found a scenario to reproduce it!

When I did the by you suggested test on a PI3B+, it always worked. When I put the SD card in the PI4 it failed...  I started thinking "what's the difference?". Well, the difference is that on my test PI, I don't have an output device and I can't play music. I didn't worry about it, but that's exactly what seems to make the difference between functioning or not!

So, I put the SD card back in my PI4 and didn't play music. I reran the test 50x and everything worked perfect.
I switched on the DAC, played a radio station and did the test again. BAM! It failed. Tried again and again... Failed!
I stopped the music and did a retry. Worked! Did this 10x, and it worked. Started playing the music and it failed again.

Sometimes, updating the PL works when playing music, but in 90% of the cases not. Although, it works 100% when not playing music

I tested this on both SD and SSD. Same behavior.

It looks like updating the PL fails when playing music. A MPD file locking issue, as the PL is stored in the dir, monitored by MPD (according /etc/mpd.conf)? I re-watched the movie I sent you to show how it fails, and indeed, I was playing music at that moment...

@TheOldPresbyope , @Tim Curtis , @Nutul It's 3:15 AM here, but tomorrow, I'll make a small movie to show you how to reproduce.