Troubleshooting

No sound

1. Open Settings → Audio outputs and press Test Main for the player. If you hear the tone, check the player’s volume fader.
2. If you hear nothing, pick another device or channel pair. A change to the outputs applies once nothing plays on them; Apply now in Settings applies it at once.
3. On Linux, prefer PipeWire or PulseAudio in Settings → Audio outputs → Audio system. They share the sound card with other programs. ALSA talks to the card directly and may find it busy.
4. JACK shows as unavailable (“no output device”) when no JACK server is running. Start the server (for example with QjackCtl) and restart the application. Set the JACK server to the sample rate in Settings (48 kHz by default): JACK runs at one rate for every program.
5. PipeWire is not offered by the downloadable archives; they reach PipeWire through its PulseAudio service, which works the same way. It is available in builds made with the pipewire feature.

Bit-perfect

• The BP badge stays off. Check each condition in Bit-perfect output: no fade, nothing else on the same outputs, a lossless file that has been analysed, and a device running at the file’s rate.
• A short silence before a track. The bit-perfect device reopened at the track’s sample rate. It happens only when the rate changes: tracks at the same rate follow each other with no gap. Keep the library at one rate to avoid it. See What it costs.
• Tracks do not mix, and Play does not fade. On a player whose Main output is bit-perfect, each track plays to its end and then the next one starts, and Play / Next and Previous switch at once: there are no crossfades or segues on such a player. Turn bit-perfect off for the device, or move the player to another output, to mix again. See What it costs.
• The volume fader does not move. The player’s Main output is bit-perfect, which holds the volume at 100 %; the fader’s tooltip says so. MIDI faders and the remote API cannot move it either. See What it costs.
• A track plays resampled, and the log says the device is busy (Linux). To change rate, the application closes the device and opens it again. In that moment the sound server (PipeWire) can take the card. The application tries again a few times; if the card is still busy, the track plays at the device’s current rate, and the next track asks for its rate again. To give the application the card to itself, open the system’s sound settings and set that card’s profile to Off (or Pro Audio), so the sound server leaves its hw: device alone. The number of tries and the wait between them are tuning.device_busy_retries and tuning.device_busy_retry_ms in the configuration file.
• The device plays, but the BP badge stays off (Windows or macOS). Exclusive access was refused, and the device plays shared.
  • Windows: another program may hold the device exclusively, or exclusive control is turned off in the device’s Advanced properties.
  • macOS: another program may hold the device in hog mode, or the device offers its rates only as a continuous range (most interfaces list fixed rates).
• A hw: device cannot be opened (Linux).
  • A sound server may be holding the card. Stop it, or set the server to leave that card alone, and restart the application.
  • Some USB DACs accept only packed 24-bit samples (S24_3LE), which the audio library does not support. Use that card through plughw: (not bit-perfect) instead.

DSD

• A DSD track plays converted although the device is set to DoP or native DSD. The log says why (“DSD converted to PCM” and the reason) for these causes: the player’s volume not at 100 %, something else playing on the device, more than two channels, or a device that refuses the rate (DoP needs the DSD rate divided by 16, for example 176.4 kHz for DSD64) or has no 24- or 32-bit format. A track that has not been analysed yet converts silently, with no log line: analyse it (Settings → Analysis) and play it again.
• Only the first track of a DSD album goes out as DSD. That is the default mixing setting: the tracks the player starts by itself play converted. Choose Keep DSD and mute the other sources in Settings → Audio outputs to keep them DSD. See DSD.
• The header shows DSD but the converter plays noise or does not lock. The converter does not recognise DoP (or the native format). Set the device back to Convert to PCM.
• A click when a DSD track starts, stops or leaves DSD. The converter needs more DSD silence: raise DSD silence (200 ms by default) in Settings → Audio outputs, Advanced.
• Other players or carts are silent on the device. A DSD track is playing with Keep DSD and mute the other sources; the Others muted badge shows. They sound again when the track ends.

“Output lost” alert

The status bar shows Output lost: <device> when a device stops responding. The players keep counting and mixing on an internal clock, so the automation does not stall. The device is retried every 2 seconds and takes over again when it returns. Reconnect the cable or power the interface back on.

“Output lost” that never clears, with a direct hw: output

A sound card used through a direct ALSA hw: output (for example a bit-perfect output) is held by Fauste Player alone: the sound server (PipeWire or PulseAudio) cannot use it at the same time. If another output goes through the sound server’s default device and that default device is the same card, that output never starts and stays Output lost. The log says “output device opened but never started” once.

Use one path per card: route every output of that card through the same hw: device (with different channels if needed), or choose another card as the sound server’s default output in your system’s sound settings.

A track shows a warning icon or a file with a cross

The file is missing (moved, deleted, unmounted: a file with a cross) or cannot be decoded (a warning sign). The players skip it. Hover the row to see which, and the file’s path.

A missing file is looked for again every 30 seconds (tuning.missing_recheck_ms in the configuration file): when the drive is mounted or the file is put back, the track becomes playable by itself. A file that cannot be decoded is checked again by itself on the same timer, by size and modification time: it is not decoded again unless one of them changed, for example when a copy finishes. To check it at once use Re-analyse in its row menu, or Settings → Analysis → Re-analyse all tracks for the whole library.

A WAV or FLAC that shows as unreadable, or would play as loud noise, may be a DTS-CD rip: the file holds a DTS bitstream instead of audio. The application refuses it (the log says “encoded bitstream stored as PCM”) and does not decode DTS. Convert it to ordinary PCM with another tool first.

Audio dropouts

The status bar warns for 5 seconds after each dropout the application detects: P1: audio dropouts (3) when a player’s decoding did not keep up with the disk (the count is for the track now playing), and <device>: audio device dropouts (2) when the output device missed a deadline (an xrun). The log records each one too, at most one line every 10 seconds per kind, with how many happened. Not every audio system reports xruns (PulseAudio does not; Windows exclusive mode does not).

• Increase the buffer size in Settings (it applies once nothing plays on that device, or at once with Apply now).
• On Linux, allow real-time scheduling. The application asks the system for it through rtkit (D-Bus). Membership of the audio group with an rtprio limit also works.
• Avoid network drives for music that plays on air.

“The interface hit an error”

A drawing error was caught. Audio is not affected. Press Restart interface. Please report it with the logs.

Logs and crash reports

See Data and backups for the log folder. There is one log file per day. Identical lines that repeat one after another are written once, followed by a line such as previous message repeated 12 times (during a long run of repeats that line is written every minute). Lines that differ, for example because they carry a counter, are not collapsed. The PulseAudio client’s routine connection messages are left out by default. Set RUST_LOG=debug in the environment for more detail (it replaces the default filter, info,pulseaudio=warn).

The log is bounded: a day’s file stops growing at 10 MiB (its last line says so; the rest of that day is not logged, which is what a flood of differing lines leads to) and the last 14 files are kept. Change them in the config file with limits.max_log_file_mb (1 to 1024), limits.max_log_files (2 to 365) and limits.log_repeat_summary_secs (1 to 3600, default 60, how often a long run of repeats is reported); they apply at the next start. Crash reports are saved as crash-<time>.txt in the same folder and are limited separately (limits.max_crash_reports per run). Attach both files when reporting a bug.