Hi guys, is anyone else experiencing drop-outs? Sometimes my Rio will just stop the music for half a second or up to 2, 3 seconds before resuming. This is in the middle of listening to music for hours, not after a song selection or likewise. One culprit I have tracked down is the following (weird one):

I have the original server software running under Windows ME on a dedicated computer. It has the HPNA card for the Rio plus an Ethernet card going to a router. Now, if the Ethernet router is shut down, the drop-outs will occur more frequently and brutally, even though the Rio has nothing to do with the Ethernet at all. My guess is that somehow the Ethernet/Windows stuff is searching the network and blocking all TCP/IP traffic while doing so? Anyway, keeping the router turned on greatly improves it.

Still, occasionally I get those ugly drop-outs and they really suck. Is nobody else experiencing that? I am very hesitant to go to another server software, since Windows installation seems less than straightforward (and, shame on me, I do NOT have any LINUX box). It does not seem to coincide with anything noticeable, such as fax calls or such - the HPNA line is free of phone calls when this happens.

Try checking that the same ip address is not being assigned to more than one receiver/machine on your network.

Cheers
Paul

I know this is probly not the answer you're looking for, but can you run the server stuff on a machine running something other than Windows 9x (95, 98, ME, etc.). Do you have either Windows 2000 or Windows XP available to you? These are closer to "real" OS's, and multitask a bit better than the 9x variety.

I remember from my days working on printer drivers in a former life, that the 9x stuff can have really high latency in completing some task when you least expect it. We had to be able to deal with short-duration API calls made by the printer driver sometimes taking a really long time, simply because the OS was off doing something else. In order to keep data streaming to the printer, we had to alter our buffering scheme. This was less of a problem on the newer OSs.

I am guessing that WinME goes out to lunch to service some ethernet event, takes a really long time, and stalls the processing of HPNA data... just a guess tho.

Well, even with XP I can forget listening to music when the virus scanner does it's weekly "full scan"

Yes, it will be replaced by Linux (or OpenBSD) in the near future!