Amarra and HiFace

[GoldenEar]

Hi,

 

I have tested both, Amarra and Pure Music, in my system and I prefer Amarra. I've purchased a license of Amarra Junior and I'm thinking about upgrading to Amarra mini. However, I experience problems with the playback of classical pieces when there should be no gap between two tracks (e.g. Beethoven's 5th Symphony between sets 3 and 4 or Beethoven's 5th piano concerto between sets 2 and 3). In playing these pieces, instead of continuous music there is 1-2 seconds of silence and then the music continues but not at the very beginning of the next set, but some seconds later.

 

In general, I always encounter some latency when starting to play music. Since the time counter in Amarra is already running while there is no sound from the speakers, I suspect that the HiFace buffers the data in order to do the reclocking. Thus my hypothesis is that when two tracks should be played gapless, Amarra does not send a gapless flow of music which in turn lets the HiFace break the buffering process and start a new one at the beginning of the next track, resulting in the dropout.

 

Dropouts are never in the middle of tracks, so I conclude that it is not a problem of system interrupts or something like that. I have disabled everything that could disturb music playback, like system sleep, time machine and spotlight.

 

Amarra support could not provide a solution, yet. Anyone who can help?

 

Regards

Kay

 

[I. G.]

Yeah, the hiFace driver has ~600msec buffer, maybe that's what collides with Amarra.