Official moOde 7.5.0 support thread

[ElmhurstFun]

I actually noticed this too last night.  Most of my players have maximum volume all the time (downstream amplifiers control the volume), but one in an old radio in the kitchen uses in-player controls.  I rarely listen to Spotify on that one, but did just last night.  I wondered if it was simply that I'm using a Pi Zero and it can't cope.  What hardware is yours running on?

That is a common element between us!   This is on a Pi Zero W, with a Hifiberry DAC+ Pro HAT.   I know the librespot version changed in this release, so maybe that is a factor.  I will experiment this weekend with the clean install (I had in-place upgraded from 7.4.1) and I have plenty of larger PI's I can test with to see if the Pi Zero is the root or not.

librespot 0.3 introduced dithering which can be taxing on lower-end hardware. You could try on your Pi Zero with dithering disabled.

Alas turning off dithering had no effect.  Nor did dropping the bitrate.
I may mention it on the librespot support forum, see if anyone else over there sees the issue.

I am one of the librespot maintainers. I can't say I've heard of anyone else reporting this. Which isn't to say it can't be an issue because at least you two are obviously encountering it. Hence my interest.

We target the RPi Zero as the lowest-powered device that we support. I don't have one, but one of our members does, and he tested both the dithering and 64-bit sample pipeline on it. So at this point I don't understand what's going on, but think it's worth pursuing.

When you run top, what CPU and RAM usage do you see? What's the current load? Perhaps high I/O usage or blocking? We'd have to investigate further and I can't reproduce.

Thanks for jumping in - found something that may be significant.   I attached two screenshots.  First screenshot shows 'top' output when spotify connect running for 20 min or so at a constant stable volume.   Second screenshot shows 'top' output during a change in volume where I pressed volume up/down several times on iphone that is being used as the spotify connect 'remote'.   Note the huge spike in 1-min load average and a whole bunch of moodeutl processes.   I can try to load moode 7.4.1 which uses earlier version of librespot and see if same thing happens.   But wondering if its librespot or moodeutl at this point.

[Tim Curtis]

Second screen shot shows a bug in moOde code :-0

I'll investigate.

[roderickvd]

Totally weird that this is triggered by a Spotify Connect volume change event. There is nothing special going on in librespot with that. Programmatically it’s the same as hitting pause, next, or whatever, it’s just a command event to be handled.

Tim, maybe it’s something in the moOde command utility that handles event notifications?

[Tim Curtis]

The bug that is causing all the instances of moodeutl to be started is in the moOde event script being used by librespot. Basically the events aren't being filtered correctly by the script resulting in code that should only run once actually being run every time the script fires.

I'll fix later today and post a patch.

[Tim Curtis]

Try the following patch.

Code:

1) Install patch
sudo wget -q http://moodeaudio.org/test/r760_patch1.zip
sudo unzip -o r760_patch1.zip -d /var/local/www/commandw/

2) Restart Spotify from Audio Config

[ElmhurstFun]

Try the following patch.

Code:

1) Install patch
sudo wget -q http://moodeaudio.org/test/r760_patch1.zip
sudo unzip -o r760_patch1.zip -d /var/local/www/commandw/

2) Restart Spotify from Audio Config

That seems to be doing the trick - thanks!   I'll keep an ear on it the next day of listening.   FWIW - prior to discovering the behavior in 'top', moving up to the RPi Zero 2 W was enough horsepower to handle the extraneous processes, but glad this is fixed & mystery solved.

[the_bertrum]

Try the following patch.

Code:

1) Install patch
sudo wget -q http://moodeaudio.org/test/r760_patch1.zip
sudo unzip -o r760_patch1.zip -d /var/local/www/commandw/

2) Restart Spotify from Audio Config

That seems to be doing the trick - thanks!   I'll keep an ear on it the next day of listening.   FWIW - prior to discovering the behavior in 'top', moving up to the RPi Zero 2 W was enough horsepower to handle the extraneous processes, but glad this is fixed & mystery solved.

The patch has worked on my set up too.  Thanks Tim.

[Tim Curtis]

Nice :-)

Also there is another fix for Spotify ALSA config that allows it to work really well with Multiroom. This will be in upcoming 7.6.1 release (sometime in December).