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Fixed 'Google Play Music tracks cut short' in Tizonia 0.18.0

Mar 17, 2019 • juanrubio

Tizonia version 0.18.0 codenamed “Huercal-Overa” is out with 48 commits, 224 files changed, 1825 insertions(+), 729 deletions(-).

Fixed ‘Google Play Music tracks cut short’

This release primarily fixes an important issue in the Google Play Music service where many tracks were being cut short. Users reported this issue and helped out by collecting logs and providing very usuful insights.

Google Play music intermittently cutting songs short” #547

Until v0.17.0, Tizonia was buffering about 20-40 seconds of track from Google Play Music, with further requests being put out periodically as the internal buffer utilization falled below a low watermark level. Apparently, the Google servers now expect the client to pull the all track data in a shorter period of time. This lead to some tracks being cut short, as the Google server would close the connection while Tizonia was still pulling data.

The internal buffering scheme in Tizonia has been updated to prevent this issue. In addition, the following configuration elements have been added to tizonia.conf in version 0.18.0. These are optional elements that can be used to increase the resilence of Tizonia in the presence of track cuts of this kind.

gmusic.buffer_seconds
soundcloud.buffer_seconds
dirble.buffer_seconds
youtube.buffer_seconds
plex.buffer_seconds

Additionally, these values can be set or overriden from the command-line with the --buffer-seconds command-line option, e.g:

$ tizonia --gmusic-unlimited-artist 'queen' --buffer-seconds=520
$ tizonia --soundcloud-genres 'piano' --buffer-seconds=720

etc...

I would like to thank the users that contributed to issue #547 with their feedback:

Filtering of Spotify ‘explicit’ tracks

In v0.18.0 there is a new configuration option. This option switches on or off the filtering of ‘explicit’ tracks from Spotify. This is useful if you, for example, have children running around in the house while you are listening to music!.

So in tizonia.conf, you can do:

spotify.allow_explicit_tracks = true|false (default: false, set to true to
                                                     allow explicit tracks)

or from the command-line:

--spotify-allow-explicit-tracks       Allow Tizonia to play explicit tracks
                                      from Spotify (default: false).

Binaries and distribution

As usual CHANGELOG.md contains all the details.

Tizonia v0.18.0 will be soon in the following distribution channels:

Coming up

Pandora support is still work-in-progress:

  • Pandora (#340)

  • Chromecast issues need fixing (#483).