little clicks and pops

Discussion about my Wifi Radio project at http://mightyohm.com/wifiradio/ or my WL-520gU talk at NOTACON.
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pasdesignal
Posts: 20
Joined: Sat Oct 02, 2010 2:31 am

Re: little clicks and pops

Post by pasdesignal »

No idea sorry. Just using mine as a mpd player on the network. What exactly are you trying to use it for?
mieczotronix
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 2:48 pm

Re: little clicks and pops

Post by mieczotronix »

I've been using it as a digital transport for my DAC, to play mp3s (since .flacs were clicking) to my amp.
I just don't happen to own any portable interface (like iphone /android) to control mpd. I only have a bulky laptop and kindle. Hence idea of controlling it via kindle.
Today I've just written a simple, lightweight shell cgi gui, which displays artist/album/track names on kindle. It runs quite fast, but so far it only has "next" and "pause" buttons and i'll have to learn more shell scripting to be able to select playlists and stuff. That's why I've been looking for a ready-made, lightweight web gui. But the only ones I've found run on PHP.
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pasdesignal
Posts: 20
Joined: Sat Oct 02, 2010 2:31 am

Re: little clicks and pops

Post by pasdesignal »

mieczotronix wrote:I've just managed to install everything on

openwrt-brcm47xx-squashfs-10.03.1-rc5

with extroot, nfs, samba, alsa drivers

However I think, I've been still hearing some tiny clicks on .flacs, but this may now be caused due to files being copied in the background onto my new drive. I will check it more thoroughly later and let you know...
I was also wondering whether I could put a simple web mpd frontend to control my player from my Kindle.
I am not sure however if I could install php to run with the existing uhttpd...and if it won't overload the system.
I have no artifacts when playing FLACs and have the same firmware as you. I presume you are using an ASUS wl-520gu?\
Mine has been consistently playing lossless audio for a couple of months now, on a pretty decent system so I would know if there were artifacts. But if MP3's work for your situation: no probs there. I also can stream music while updating mpd or transferring files onto the nfs mounted harddrive. "Transmission" is also writing files to the same harddrive occasionally. (Although this run on a seperate router) My point being that I think the player is stable and suitable for lossless play.

Your kindle control surface sounds interesting! I am very pleased with the mpod app running on ipod touch. Its slowly developed, but always upgraded in the right direction. Second only to itunes remote. My only complaint is response time of commands. Sounds like your kindle code is fast? Jealous.
mieczotronix
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 2:48 pm

Re: little clicks and pops

Post by mieczotronix »

Well. I played a flac album yesterday evening on my hifi and listened to another album on headphones and I am quite sure I did heard some clicking. Now clicks are very rare, and occur once every couple of minutes and are audible only on quite airy and silent material, like a solo vocal or a solo instrument etc. I am pretty sure the clicks are still there. I am not 100% sure whether that are flaws of records I played or not, but I will check that again. Anyway they occur so rarely that it doesn't distract you from listening and they no longer send my DAC haywire.
As for the kindle interface it is as fast, as kindle's web browser can be. So it starts up quite fast but is not very interactive or responsive. I only implemented six buttons so far: back, next, pause/play and 3 more to load predefined playlists. So it's not very useful at the moment.
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gerben
Posts: 164
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2010 8:41 am
Location: Netherlands

Re: little clicks and pops

Post by gerben »

I had some 'popping' too, which turned out to be the wifi signal interfering with my hifi set.
mieczotronix
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 2:48 pm

Re: little clicks and pops

Post by mieczotronix »

Hi there.
Jut to let you know, I never actually managed to completely get rid of those pops and clicks. Changing firmware, extrooting or killing all spurious services never helped. The only solution that worked for me was downsampling to 320kbps VBR mp3.
However my my player in time developed some other annoyances, such as mpd crashes on pause/play or playlist operations. Reinstalling everyting from scratch usually helped, but not for very long. So for me the thing never worked as I would expect it.
The good thing is I learned openwrt and scripting quite a lot while fighting with those issues.

Recently I finally gave up and switched to raspberry pi.
Installed the latest raspbian, downloaded mpd + mpc, plugged my DAC and presto - it worked right away. And it has been working like a charm so far.
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