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Pitch warble on start of playback or pause/unpause #107
Description
When I start playback of any track, whether to a joined speaker or to a single speaker, running Sendspin-cli, I hear an audible pitch warble or gradual increase over approximately 0.5 to 1 second, almost as though I dropped the needle before the record player was fully up to speed.
The main device I experience this on is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspbian 13/Trixie, with a HiFiBerry DAC Hat.
More in depth discussion on discord here but I believe the conclusion is that the Sendspin player implementation determines how clock sync mismatches are handled; so I suppose it's an issue with this player.
I also notice that a very brief portion of the beginning of a track is cut off, or perhaps inaudible due to some kind of volume ramp up or fade in. On tracks where there is audio immediately it's clearly missing the first fraction of a second. Not sure if this should be recorded as a separate issue.
Interestingly, starting playback of a new track for the first time from MA exhibits this issue; whereas restarting the track using the previous track button does not (the beginning of the audio is played in full). This makes the issue more easily detectable.
Activity
seadowg commentedon Feb 8, 2026
This happens for me pretty reliably when resuming playback from a paused state. As you say it sounds pretty much exactly like dropping the needle mid-track on a record player that's spinning up. I'm mostly experiencing this using this CLI through
uvon a Mac Mini M1.balloob commentedon Feb 15, 2026
Sendspin CLI v5 beta has been released with the updated aiosendspin v4. When MA nightly is updated with music-assistant/server#3158, can you try again.
trisweb commentedon Feb 15, 2026
Absolutely, I'm watching with my finger on the deploy button☺️
balloob-travel commentedon Mar 11, 2026
Can you verify if the issue still occurs in the latest beta of Music Assistant?
seadowg commentedon Mar 11, 2026
@balloob-travel happy to check, but do I need to run the beta of the MA server? Or, can I just install the latest CLI (https://github.com/Sendspin/sendspin-cli/releases) and use with the latest MA server (2.7.10)?
balloob-travel commentedon Mar 11, 2026
Please use latest beta or nightly build of Music Assistant, or run sendspin serve --demo
seadowg commentedon Mar 11, 2026
Will the newest release of the CLI work with the current Music Assistant version? To be clear, I'm happy to try this out, but I also don't want to break my setup.
It sounds like in theory I just need to do the following:
Is that right? Or, are you meaning I should just use the CLI version I already have with the beta server?
trisweb commentedon Mar 11, 2026
I've been testing with the latest beta MA for the last couple days with latest Sendspin.
Can confirm pitch shift and warble are gone. Song starts from the beginning without skipping any samples and pitch is rock solid from the start and stays that way.
I want to test more with groups but so far it's looking good.
maximmaxim345 commentedon Mar 16, 2026
Thanks for testing @trisweb ! Closing this issue.
seadowg commentedon Apr 8, 2026
Is this expected to be fixed using the latest release of this and the server (2.8.2)? I'm still able to reproduce. It appears to only happen on the first stream or after toggling the visualizer though.
trisweb commentedon Apr 8, 2026
I'd like to agree, I have also heard pitch shift from time to time on latest Sendspin-CLI and server. It seems to be less frequent but I can still reproduce.
I'd like to state this definitively: I disagree with audible pitch change being a permissible outcome in any circumstance for any reason. I realize that's not aligned with some of the technical challenges, but it's an experience outcome I'm not willing to budge on, and I'm very confident about that.
I'd love to understand the nerdy details of why it occurs and what we might do alternatively to resolve the time shift.
trisweb commentedon Apr 11, 2026
Actually, I sat down and tried to reproduce this, and I couldn't. Either I was misremembering or the pitch shift is mostly inaudible. @seadowg are you using the beta version of music assistant?
seadowg commentedon Apr 11, 2026
No I'm on 2.8.3. It seems to only happen for me after changing the audio format or enabling/disabling visualizer - not really a problem in day to day use, but wanted to make sure I reported it.
Reduce audible startup sync correction (#255)
trisweb commentedon Jun 18, 2026
@seadowg can you test again with the latest 7.5.0? The sync correction has been reworked so hopefully there's a good deal less audible warble possible.
seadowg commentedon Jun 19, 2026
Can test today!
seadowg commentedon Jun 19, 2026
@trisweb this does indeed seem to be fixed for me!