I am experiencing this bug reported at the upstream Kodi tracker. That is, I am experiencing a slight skip at the beginning of a FLAC file when one track in my playlist gives way to another one.
I have noticed that in the new Kodi version, every single time the track changes, the “Random albums” list on the Kodi home screen is regenerated. If you have album art, that means that Kodi will have to access the disk to load all that art. As album art images can sometimes be quite large, and Kodi has to load those images for several albums at once, I am wondering if this I/O load is too much for the Pi, and so this is the reason that FLAC playback briefly skips.
Is there any way to disable the automatic regeneration of the “Random albums” list or specify that it should only be regenerated when the player fully stops, not on each track change? Is it possible to program that feature into a theme, and so users could configure that in the OSMC skin settings, or is this something that has to be discussed with Kodi upstream?
OK, so I see that with the default skin menus are editable. I disabled the display of the Random Albums list on the home screen entirely. However, gapless playback still does not work correctly. I’m not familiar with Kodi internals, so it is not clear to me whether Kodi always generates a Random Albums list even if it is not configured to be displayed. But either way, I suppose this is indeed an upstream issue, not an OSMC one.
As album art images can sometimes be quite large, and Kodi has to load those images for several albums at once, I am wondering if this I/O load is too much for the Pi, and so this is the reason that FLAC playback briefly skips.
I have the same issue on the Raspberry PI’s I have. The only PI capable to decently playback FLAC is the PI 3 - the PI B+ and PI 2 can’t. I had even disabled all scrapping etc. while using these as audio only devices.
Don’t get me wrong - some FLAC’s played back fine 24bit/96khz, some did not. But some of my best albums with highest quality won’t play back at all 24-bit/192kHz (Hotel California) - not enough CPU power for these. I play these back on my Vero4k in the living room. Have way better hardware there
No, this is not a matter of the Pi being underpowered, this is a bug in Kodi 17 specifically. On earlier versions of OSMC with Kodi 16, gapless playback of FLAC files worked fine. Even with the new OSMC version, if I install MPD and play my FLAC files through it instead of Kodi, gapless playback works normally.
I was never able to do a decent playback on my Raspberry PI’s - and I am a first-time user of these devices.
Reason also that I looked for an alternative after having spent too much time trying to get it to run without issues.
I suggest that you report this on the kodi.tv forums then.
The bug is already reported at the Kodi upstream bug tracker. However, as the user that reported it also has a Raspberry Pi, I wondered if this could be traced to the OSMC theme. But after tweaking the OSMC theme myself as well as trying different themes, I am still experiencing the bug, which shows that it is indeed (as I said) an upstream Kodi problem and not an OSMC one.
