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I use a Linkstation Pro LS XHL to store my iTunes music. Each time a song started playing, there was a brief period of garbled sound before the song began to play normally.

I looked in the trashbox for the iTunes share and found that iTunes was writing a fairly sizable .tmp file into that folder every time a song was played. Thinking that this file write was messing up streaming, I disabled the trashbox. This seemed to fix the problem.

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parsobarus wrote:
 

I use a Linkstation Pro LS XHL to store my iTunes music. Each time a song started playing, there was a brief period of garbled sound before the song began to play normally.

 

I looked in the trashbox for the iTunes share and found that iTunes was writing a fairly sizable .tmp file into that folder every time a song was played. Thinking that this file write was messing up streaming, I disabled the trashbox. This seemed to fix the problem.

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I'm going to have to call BS on myself. It turns out, this DID NOT fix the problem, as it is doing it again.

About 10 seconds into every song, the CPU and network usage spike for a couple of seconds, causing garbled sound and slower tempo. I'll post more as I learn more.

Are you wired or wireless? Any diff between wired vs/ wireless network connection performance?

Have you tried multiple applications and/or codecs to see if the results are any different?

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rinthos wrote:

Are you wired or wireless? Any diff between wired vs/ wireless network connection performance?

Have you tried multiple applications and/or codecs to see if the results are any different?

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Hi rinthos,

My connection is full duplex gigabit ethernet.

I've tried both apple lossless (alac) and aac codecs and the results are the same. I haven't tried another application.

It appears the garbled playback occurs when iTunes writes its library database to the Linkstation. Each time a different song starts playing, it overwrites the 16Mb library.xml file and, in addition, writes a 2.3Mb .tmp file to the itunes folder. I have read that iTunes does this to update the play count, although I don't know what the .tmp files are for.

Also, it doesn't perform the file write every time. I just played 7 songs, but it only wrote the library/.tmp files 5 times.

It turned out, the problem was with my Vista power plan setting. I had set it to "power saver". This caused the AMD Cool n Quiet software to lock the CPU clock rate at 800 Mhz.

This was just too slow to keep up with playing the music during the file writes. After I set it to "balanced", it allows the CPU to rev up to 2.6 Ghz when needed and the "garbling" is gone.