SoundPusher stream dies every 20-30min

[jebediah2]

On Catalina (10.15), I use SoundPusher to send a 5.1 optical signal from a USB audio sound card (Sound Blaster X4) to an AV receiver and watch movies using VLC.

However, the stream stops every 20-30min and the right sequence to make it come alive again is (1) quit VLC (2) quit SoundPusher (3) restart sound card. SoundPusher freezes a few seconds whenever interacting with it after the stream has died, until it is restarted.

I would like to troubleshoot this to determine whether this is a SoundPusher issue or a sound card issue, but I am not sure where to look.

Sometimes I have the VLC/system output set to an aggregate device that I set up in the Audio Midi app to have both SoundPusher Audio (=SBX4's SPDIF) and the SBX4's analog speakers active in order to connect surround speakers that are far back directly to the sound card, but the problem happens in both setups.

[q-p]

This is not something that I have seen (and I also use VLC occasionally). I am not using aggregate devices, though.

You may be able to create a "spindump" (e.g. from Activity Monitor) on SoundPusher.app and / or coreaudiod. That might contain an indication of where things are when this occurs.

You can also try creating a sysdiagnose https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/59917/how-do-you-get-system-diagnostic-files-from-macos immediately when things go back.

Of course, you can also try the Console.app firehose to spot anything in retrospect for the timeframe of the problem.

[jebediah2]

Thanks. I'll do that at the next opportunity and report back.

[q-p]

@jebediah2 Can this be closed as well?

[jebediah2]

I think this issue deserves a bit more testing because I think it happens in a particular hardware/software setup. By reproducing it we could isolate the issue and look into whether this is anything SoundPusher can or should address. I'll try and run more tests this week.