It’s in test release.
//devices-IP/dev and enable test
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Many thanks!
Hello gents, I was wondering if there had been any progress with this, knowing of course that you have no obligation to work on it.
But it seems to me that this shouldn’t require a special plugin. It’s not trying to add a new function that didn’t exist before. As it is, Volumio keeps the HDMI signal alive for as long as it’s playing music. When the album finishes, a few seconds later it stops sending the signal, but shouldn’t Volumio have some setting under the hood to adjust that timeout, from several seconds to maybe forever? Even if it’s capped at let’s say, 1 hour, it would be better than the current timeout, because the first song in a listening session would have the few seconds missing, but every album after that would play fine from the beginning.
I don’t know, maybe this is hard coded, but it’s something to think about.
Hello,
This available in beta
Maybe for you?
Above [PLUGIN] Audio Keepalive (Volumio 4) - Seven years, one toggle, zero lost seconds - #41 by Wheaten
Yes, that’s the latest version of the plugin, but at least in my case, it doesn’t work. I believe back then I already submitted the logs and stuff.
Hey @PluggedIn,
Reports of this plugin’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Although not by much.
You are correct that v1.1.x did not work on your system. It did not work because the entire architecture was wrong. The old plugin tried to be both the silence feeder and the audio passthrough simultaneously, inside the player process, sharing a single hardware handle between a silence thread and MPD’s audio writes. On your Onkyo’s HDMI/iec958 chain this produced results ranging from “no sound” to “existential crisis.” On my I2S DAC it worked, because I2S is too electrically simple to notice when software is having a nervous breakdown.
v2.0.1 is not a fix. It is a confession that the previous approach was fundamentally wrong, followed by a complete rewrite.
The old model: two writers fighting over one hardware handle.
The new model: one writer. Always running. Never stops. Never shares.
A standalone daemon now owns the hardware exclusively. It feeds -100dB Gaussian noise when idle - inaudible, but enough to keep your Onkyo convinced that someone is home. When music plays, it arrives over a Unix socket and gets mixed in. The noise is still there underneath, but at 0.001% of full scale your ears, your Onkyo, and the laws of thermodynamics do not care. When music stops, the daemon keeps feeding noise. Your receiver never sees the stream drop. There is no handoff, no race condition, no thread switching, no “I was writing but now you write but wait I was still writing.”
The plugin is in the store as beta, v2.0.1. Same install process as before - plugin store, Audio Interfaces, Audio Keepalive, install, enable, toggle on. The plugin now also installs a system service that runs independently of MPD, Spotify, AirPlay, or whatever else decides to make noise. If MPD restarts, the daemon does not care. If you switch from Tidal Connect to local playback, the daemon does not care. It has one job and no opinions.
To your earlier point about whether this should be a Volumio core feature rather than a plugin - you are not wrong. But getting the design right required exactly the kind of iterative failure that happened on your system over the last few months. A plugin is where you make mistakes. Core is where you put things after you have stopped making them. We are getting closer to that second category. An odd scribble here and there.
After installing, here is the test sequence:
First, confirm the daemon is alive and talking to your hardware. SSH into your Volumio and run:
touch /data/keepalive
Wait a couple of seconds. Your Onkyo should display the audio format (PCM 2.0 or similar) and you should hear a hiss - that is -30dB noise, deliberately audible so you know the daemon is writing to your hardware. If you hear it, the entire chain from daemon through iec958 to your HDMI output is working.
Then remove it:
rm /data/keepalive
The hiss disappears, replaced by -100dB noise. Inaudible, but the daemon is still writing. Your Onkyo should still show the format on its display.
If that works, move to the real tests:
- Play a track. Does audio start cleanly from the first second?
- Pause. Does the Onkyo hold lock? Does the display stay on PCM?
- Resume. Any glitch at the transition?
- Track change - any gap or stutter?
- Stop completely. Wait 30 seconds. Does the Onkyo stay awake?
- Play again after the long pause. First second intact?
Logs from http://volumio.local/dev if anything goes sideways. You know the ritual by now.
Kind Regards,