Stereo Tool

Hello,

I am having problems where VLC Input is continuously dropping out or looping.

So I have a test machine on the bench that is a fresh Windows 11 install and Stereo Tools 10.70 and the latest 64 bit VLC which is 3.0.21 I believe and I am also having problems in a Windows 7 machine running 10.41.

But I've had it where it will just stop playing and then I get the error boxes saying there is no input audio and it seems like it is hung up on trying to restart the stream with only 1 attempt made. But if I press the restart sound cards manually the stream will start up and start playing again.

And in the Win 7 machine it will glitch out and play the last buffer length on repeat until I can restart it manually. I caught the Win 11 machine play the buffer on repeat once.

Apparently the restart soundcard on error check box no longer works on VLC?

But is there a problem with the latest VLC or is it something I can fix with a setting in Stereo Tools?

I saw same looping happening time to time on one station, and have no idea how to fix it, it seems it just works like that, auto restart does not help too.

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It's getting bad to the point where I have to restart it every 3-4 hours when it starts looping.

When this loop happens, is any error reported? Or does everything in the GUI look like it's fine?

Any way to reproduce this behavior? Maybe by unplugging the network or something like that?

This is a problem that I've reported at least two or three times over the past couple of years. The only response I've ever received was to blame LIBVLC. Still, the functionality remains in ST, bugs intact.

Most, if not all of the problems I've encountered revolve around any loss of either network connectivity to the ST computer OR loss of incoming audio stream. If the stream source drops, for any reason, VLC usually devolves into a continuous loop of its buffer. Sometimes it will recover, but not always. In that case, ST has to be shut down and restarted. Setting VLC error flags has no effect on this, and no front-screen error is indicated.

In rare cases, the computer will lock up and will not be reachable remotely, but the looping might continue (this happened to me this morning). This forces me to have a remote switch on the power input so I can force-reset the computer.

Again... this is not a new problem. It's been going on for years.