Apparently I'm going to be doing an ongoing series on things I've figured out about how to get Spotty working in my network ... (No disrepect to Michael and his excellent work on Spotty - very much finding problems of my own making and sorting them out).
TLDR: If you are using spotify in a network with any powerline equipment, make sure that the powerline adapters are distanced from *any* PWM power supplies (wall warts, USB power supplies, etc).
In my case, I was getting the problem of Spotty/SpotifyConnect intermittently and not so intermittently stopping for no apparent reason, and it was affecting both hardware (various generations of Squeezeboxen) and software (Squeezelite-X) players. I eventually realised that I had a USB power supply on the same power board as a powerline adapter - I removed USB supply and the problem went away - I'm now getting hours of rock solid playback from SpotifyConnect.
Some general notes:
- We had been having some problems with lag on the LAN. This fix seems to have helped with that as well.
- The network was broadly reliable for everything but SpotifyConnect. Video streaming (cloud and local), and local LMS content to the players. I'm guessing buffering is better when it is not being managed by both LMS and Spotify?
- Suprisingly, this issue affected the whole network - even when my LMS server, spotty clients and internet were all connected to a single router, the PWM disruption to the powerline networking was enough to take out SpotifyConnect.
I'd love to say that I worked this out with a bit of skill and patience, but it it is unfortunately a case of repeating an error I make every few years and going "Oh yeah - I remember now". Old dog, new tricks apparently :-(.
TLDR: If you are using spotify in a network with any powerline equipment, make sure that the powerline adapters are distanced from *any* PWM power supplies (wall warts, USB power supplies, etc).
In my case, I was getting the problem of Spotty/SpotifyConnect intermittently and not so intermittently stopping for no apparent reason, and it was affecting both hardware (various generations of Squeezeboxen) and software (Squeezelite-X) players. I eventually realised that I had a USB power supply on the same power board as a powerline adapter - I removed USB supply and the problem went away - I'm now getting hours of rock solid playback from SpotifyConnect.
Some general notes:
- We had been having some problems with lag on the LAN. This fix seems to have helped with that as well.
- The network was broadly reliable for everything but SpotifyConnect. Video streaming (cloud and local), and local LMS content to the players. I'm guessing buffering is better when it is not being managed by both LMS and Spotify?
- Suprisingly, this issue affected the whole network - even when my LMS server, spotty clients and internet were all connected to a single router, the PWM disruption to the powerline networking was enough to take out SpotifyConnect.
I'd love to say that I worked this out with a bit of skill and patience, but it it is unfortunately a case of repeating an error I make every few years and going "Oh yeah - I remember now". Old dog, new tricks apparently :-(.