I had a rush of blood to the head and bought a new mesh wifi 3-pack during 'Prime Day' (TP-Link Deco M5). Easy enough to set up, and the wifi signal is a little bit stronger than with my old Apple Airport Extreme.
I run LMS on a Raspberry Pi 4 running pCP. I run it wireless - yes, I know that's not advised but it has a strong signal and it's been totally reliable to date with the Airport Extreme. It connected ok to the new wifi and was happily playing through the attached USB DAC. But when I added in a couple of synced Booms I started to get dropouts - more like momentary pauses in fact. One Boom is on a powerline adapter, and the other is next to the new wifi AP with 100% signal strength. I tried turning off the Booms in turn, and concluded that having either one synced with the USB DAC caused these glitches.
After tinkering around for an hour or two I decided to give up and put the old reliable Airport Extreme back, and here's the odd thing. The glitches then continued, even though the new mesh AP was powered down. The only way I could get the system working properly was to restore the pCP SD card from last night's back up.
To see whether I was imagining things I repeated the process:
- working fine with Airport Extreme
- swapped to mesh AP -> glitches
- swapped back to Airport Extreme -> still glitches
- restored SD card from previous image -> glitches gone.
It seems to be related to synchronising players. My suspicion is it has something to do with network latency, and perhaps the faulty or unreliable latency information from the mesh AP setup is being remembered even when the Airport Extreme is swapped back in.
Can anyone comment on how network latency is measured and implemented? Can I tweak any settings to solve this?
My absolute priority is a reliable glitch-free LMS setup, so if I can't get round this PDQ then I'm going to send the mesh kit back, since it appears to be incompatible with LMS at some level. I had to turn off one of the more useful features anyway (802.11r, which allows for fast handover of mobile devices between APs) because the Booms wouldn't connect with it enabled.
Has anyone else experienced (and solved) this?
I run LMS on a Raspberry Pi 4 running pCP. I run it wireless - yes, I know that's not advised but it has a strong signal and it's been totally reliable to date with the Airport Extreme. It connected ok to the new wifi and was happily playing through the attached USB DAC. But when I added in a couple of synced Booms I started to get dropouts - more like momentary pauses in fact. One Boom is on a powerline adapter, and the other is next to the new wifi AP with 100% signal strength. I tried turning off the Booms in turn, and concluded that having either one synced with the USB DAC caused these glitches.
After tinkering around for an hour or two I decided to give up and put the old reliable Airport Extreme back, and here's the odd thing. The glitches then continued, even though the new mesh AP was powered down. The only way I could get the system working properly was to restore the pCP SD card from last night's back up.
To see whether I was imagining things I repeated the process:
- working fine with Airport Extreme
- swapped to mesh AP -> glitches
- swapped back to Airport Extreme -> still glitches
- restored SD card from previous image -> glitches gone.
It seems to be related to synchronising players. My suspicion is it has something to do with network latency, and perhaps the faulty or unreliable latency information from the mesh AP setup is being remembered even when the Airport Extreme is swapped back in.
Can anyone comment on how network latency is measured and implemented? Can I tweak any settings to solve this?
My absolute priority is a reliable glitch-free LMS setup, so if I can't get round this PDQ then I'm going to send the mesh kit back, since it appears to be incompatible with LMS at some level. I had to turn off one of the more useful features anyway (802.11r, which allows for fast handover of mobile devices between APs) because the Booms wouldn't connect with it enabled.
Has anyone else experienced (and solved) this?