balenaSound won't play music.

Please help me. So I have set up the balenaSound using this guide; https://www.balena.io/blog/turn-your-old-speakers-or-hi-fi-into-bluetooth-receivers-using-only-a-raspberry-pi/

But it will not do any music and or sound! It plays the doo doo when I connect via Bluetooth or Airplay.
I have tried this with an iOS phone and an Android Phone.
Thanks in advance for your help. :smiley:

Hey @JesseBlueberry welcome to the forums and thanks for trying the project! Well done on successfully deploying the code, the fact you’re hearing the sound when you connect is a great sign.

Usually, as you’ve clearly been able to get everything working, this is simply a case that the volume on the client device is not turned up high enough to hear the output. I’d double check everything is turned up or perhaps try some other client devices.

I hope this helps!

I have tried to do this, but since we don’t have many speakers, (we were going to buy some) I have been using external speakers connected to my computer. I have put the volume all the way up.

It also drops the bluetooth connection.

Hey @JesseBlueberry,
we think that a different client device might help. Could you do a test with a laptop or a phone and see if the problem persists ?

Yes it does. It does it with 3 different devices.

Hey @JesseBlueberry,
may I ask you to please clarify the “external speakers connected to my computer” setup ?
Could I ask you also to run amixer on the bluetooth-audio container and share with us the output of that command ?

The output of the command is
Simple mixer control ‘PCM’,0
Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined
Playback channels: Mono
Limits: Playback -10239 - 400
Mono: Playback -2258 [75%] [-22.58dB] [on]
I have a surround sound audio setup that uses 1 AUX cable.

Hi, can you please run this command and see if you can hear sounds afterwards?: amixer -M sset PCM,0 100%. This will raise volume to 100%.

You can use this command: aplay -D hw:0,0 /usr/src/sounds/connect.wav to test wether the audio is coming out or not. I’ll play the connect sound you hear when connecting via bluetooth.

It plays the sound.
Simple mixer control ‘PCM’,0
Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined
Playback channels: Mono
Limits: Playback -10239 - 400
Mono: Playback 400 [100%] [4.00dB] [on]
root@e32dd0f:/# aplay -D hw:0,0 /usr/src/sounds/connect.wav
Playing WAVE ‘/usr/src/sounds/connect.wav’ : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate 44100 Hz, Stereo

Ok, so that means that the app is getting the audio out. So the problem is in the client you are using to stream the audio initially. How are you streaming audio? I noticed at the start of this thread you said your bluetooth connection is dropping? Is that still the case? Can you try streaming via Spotify or Airplay?

With airplay it connects, and when I go to play music, it says its playing, but its not. I cannot use Spotify as I do not have premium. I noticed that is says Playback Channels: Mono. Does that mean anything? Yes it does drop the connection via bluetooth. Also snapcast-server always goes Downloading, Downloaded and then restarts infinitely. Could that be a problem?

I’m unsure if that is related to the audio issues, but it gives us something else to try. Can you disable multiroom, which will reduce the running containers and see if that helps? You can see how to do this here https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-sound#multi-room by adding a device variable of DISABLE_MULTI_ROOM.

It only says
default, balenaSound will start in multi-room mode. When running multi-room you can stream audio into a fleet of devices and have it play perfectly synchronized. It does not matter wether you have 2 or 100 devices, you only need them to be part of the same local network.

If you don’t want to use multi-room or you only have one device, you can disable it by creating the DISABLE_MULTI_ROOM variable (with any value, for example: 1 ).

Note: Multi-room requires a network router that supports IP multicast/broadcast (most modern routers do).
How do I change the variable?

Hi, you can add this via device configuration variables see https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/manage/configuration/#managing-device-configuration-variables. So add a variable with the name of DISABLE_MULTI_ROOM with a value of 1. Additionally there is some information under the “What Next” section in the balenaSound blog post here: https://www.balena.io/blog/turn-your-old-speakers-or-hi-fi-into-bluetooth-receivers-using-only-a-raspberry-pi/

Idk if this will help but it keeps repeating this in logs.
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2122 != 2120
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2125 != 2123
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2127 != 2126
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2135 != 2134
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2140 != 2138
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2145 != 2141
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2154 != 2153
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2159 != 2157
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2162 != 2161
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2167 != 2165
08.04.20 10:56:58 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2172 != 2170
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) Installed service ‘snapcast-server sha256:16fba5871ec44bd2ddeb6de70dc8a6738ad762b16f07f8bd4b8c9d2b7ff4bb25’
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) Starting service ‘snapcast-server sha256:16fba5871ec44bd2ddeb6de70dc8a6738ad762b16f07f8bd4b8c9d2b7ff4bb25’
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2185 != 2183
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2189 != 2188
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2194 != 2191
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2199 != 2198
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2204 != 2203
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2209 != 2206
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2218 != 2215
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2223 != 2221
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2228 != 2227
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2236 != 2234
08.04.20 10:56:59 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2241 != 2239
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2250 != 2246
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2263 != 2260
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2268 != 2266
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2273 != 2271
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2277 != 2276
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2290 != 2288
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2295 != 2293
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2300 != 2298
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2305 != 2304
08.04.20 10:57:00 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2313 != 2312
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2319 != 2318
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2327 != 2326
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2332 != 2330
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2337 != 2336
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2346 != 2345
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2351 != 2349
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2359 != 2354
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2364 != 2363
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2369 != 2368
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2373 != 2372
08.04.20 10:57:01 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2378 != 2377
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2391 != 2389
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2396 != 2395
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2401 != 2399
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2405 != 2404
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2410 != 2408
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2415 != 2413
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2420 != 2418
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2425 != 2423
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2429 != 2427
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2434 != 2433
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2437 != 2436
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2442 != 2439
08.04.20 10:57:02 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2447 != 2445
08.04.20 10:57:03 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2452 != 2450
08.04.20 10:57:03 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2455 != 2454
08.04.20 10:57:03 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2457 != 2456
08.04.20 10:57:03 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2465 != 2463
08.04.20 10:57:03 (-0400) bluetooth-audio /usr/bin/bluealsa: Missing RTP packet: 2474 != 2472
And it doesn’t drop connection but doesn’t play.

This Missing RTP packet: 2122 != 2120 usually points to a known error with Raspberry Pi 3’s where bluetooth interferes with wifi signal (see here for more details). Are you using a RPi 3?

If you disconnect from bluetooth and use AirPlay it should work though. Can you verify AirPlay’s volume is not set too low?

Lastly about this:

Also snapcast-server always goes Downloading, Downloaded and then restarts infinitely. Could that be a problem?

Yes, this is a problem :stuck_out_tongue: Can you confirm that all your services have downloaded and are in Running status?

I am using a RPi 3. It still keeps downloading, downloaded and then starting, etc

Hey @JesseBlueberry,
Catching up on this thread, it seems we’ve tried a lot of things here.

snapcast-server service seems to be stuck in a restart loop.
Can you confirm if you’ve disabled the multi-room feature by setting the DISABLE_MULTI_ROOM to and giving it a value of 1 as mentioned above?

You could also run the Device Health Checks from the Diagnostics tab of your device and confirm that it is working fine?

Everything says “Succeeded.”
Also I cannot reply to this for a couple of days because I am going to my camp where there is no wifi or data.