Fault playing music with Sonos from Windows XP

At the start of this video, we see a Sonos Controller showing a current track coming to and end.

When the next track starts, there is silence for approximately the first 11 seconds; when the music does kick in it's clear that the original track was not silent at the beginning.

Then we restart the new track and it plays normally from the beginning. This shows that the MP3 file itself was fine.

Music is being served from a shared folder on a file server built around an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM, Windows XP Professional and a HighPoint PCIe RAID card with six 400GB Samsung drives attached in a RAID-5 array with one hot spare. The Sonos players (8 in total) are connected with a mixture of wired and wireless connections.

This behaviour has appeared with the change to this new file server. Previously the system used a Buffalo TeraStation. This was fine, although when the firmware in that product was updated to include power-saving spin-down, starting music after a long (30 mins or more) gap produced stuttering for the first few seconds as the drives span up, after which everything would work normally.

The problem illustrated here is repeatable and not dependent on long delays.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• sonos
• windows
• xp
• playback
• fault