Make a single client "master"

[badaix]

Make a single client "master"

[s1lvester]

So you want to reroute another time-signal through your already overloaded network that produces skips?

[pfink]

Another solution would be to extend the server functionality. Then the server could act as this master client so that no additional traffic is produced.

[sp4ceman]

@s1lvester i don't know if it would add a time-signal if a main client is just sort of "playing the song" locally while the rest of the clients use the sync mechanism.

[vdbee]

I indeed had in mind to extend the server's functionality. I made this request because I suffered quite some stuttering during playback, also on the server side. However, I reconfigured my asound.conf to achieve playback at server side without having snapclient there. Although it did not solve the stuttering (I will try a faster SD-card), this asound.conf enables running snapcast in combination with Spotify-connect-web and Mopidy on OSMC all sharing the same USB-DAC

asound.txt

remark: it looses synchronous playback!

[pfink]

@vdbee: But this doesn't make so much sense because you'll loose synchronicity. If you don't have the requirement to play audio synchronous, you should not use snapcast. In this case, you can use any software that supports audio streaming (e.g. pulseaudio or mpd) and it'll probably work much better than snapcast.

[vdbee]

@pfink: Yes, you're completely right. I renounced synchronous playback in an attempt to get rid of my stuttering issue. However, I should have made that explicit in my comment. I'll update it right away.

[badaix]

If you "hear" the stuttering even locally then something else is going wrong. I only experience audible drops when I have problems with my WiFi connection.
At some point you always have to resync somehow. There is always some small buffer involved and soundcards that play at 48003 Hz instead of 48000 Hz, which is slowly eating up you buffer.
I could imagine to be more tolerant when to resync: when you start the snapclient manually in a shell, you will see three audio buffers and their mean deviation from the perfect sync. If they exceed certain thresholds, a resync will happen (drop packets, play faster, ...).
Maybe you can try this and if it looks "wild" instead of "smooth" you can copy paste some of the log messages here.