playback of lights on E1.31 get out of sync with audio

[Brad Stucky]

Last year I didn't have any problems with pixel prop lighting falling out of sync with the audio.   I added a few more pixel props this year and low and behold, the effects were lagging out of sync about 1 second by the end of the song.   This problem took a while to figure out since one of 4 of my computers managed to play properly.  (a   i7-3820 running on X79 chipset)  My old Dell 760 for a show computer just wouldn't cut it this year but the sync mismatch wasn't any greater than the other 2 computers;  an i5-3470 Dell 790 Optiplex, and an i7-3770 running on an Z77 Gigabyte board.  This led me to believe it wasn't a CPU usage problem particularly when CPU usage from the sequencer was almost always below 20% on any of the machines and much less when  running a show.   After searching Google for tweeking network connections, I discovered that one of the advanced settings for the network adapter in Windows 10 deals with flow control.  I guess this is ON for Rx and Tx by default.  Just disable this.  There may be other settings that can be adjusted depending on which network interface card/chip you have.   After I turned this off,  I had no more problems with lights syncing to audio, even with my old Dell 760.   I'm guess that my X79 board just has a faster network interface than the other computers.   I'm running 60 universes on E1.31 this year and last year I had 32 universes.  I am using version 5.3.10 this year unless I discover some problem I can't fix.

[debtoews]

is your audio file on constant bit rate mp3?

[Brad Stucky]

Thanks for the suggestion.

It's the same audio file I used last year.  I make sure all my audio files are constant bit-rate.  Also, I discovered if I removed the newly added prop universes from the network configuration file,  the sequence would stay in sync.  As I added them back one at a time the problem became worse.  A couple times the data stream would pause after getting out of sync, and resume at a point where it was again in sync,  but most often it would just progressively get more and more out of sync as it came to the end of the sequence.  The next sequence in a show would begin on sync and then the same thing would happen to it.   It didn't matter if the show was using the playback file or if I was just playing directly from the sequencer.  In the sequencer, i noticed that the preview was playing fine while the actual props were falling behind.  That is part of what led me to check about network lag.

What I might check out is adding a bunch of extra universes using identical props and then copy and pasted the data to these extra props, add the universes to the network configuration and then see when it becomes a problem again for my computers.

Thanks again and have a Merry Christmas