Audio File In over network freezes TouchDesigner

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

Hi!

I have three channels (main, ambient, effect) and I am playing mp3 files over a local network. Sometimes lots is going on on the network and TD becomes unresponsive loading the files. (Main audio track is stopped, no visuals, UI is unresponsive). This takes up to 3s in the performance monitor. This is exacerbated when lots of effects are played in short order.

However, I already set open time to 0ms and also playing around with pre-read length does not seem to make a difference.

I am trying to avoid loading the files separately as loading with webclient dat or python requests also seems to block TD.

Any advice or pointers at what I could look at?

Best,
Marten

2

I created a testcase for this with a small python flask server to simulate slower loading of audio files. Even though open timeout is 0, TD totally locks up.
Is there a way to know if an audio file has been loaded?

simulate_network_download.zip (18.1 KB)

4

Thanks, I’ll take a look

5

Thanks, let me know if something isn’t clear with the file!

6

@malcolm Any news on this? this is severely impacting one of our client projects and there seems to be nothing I can do to fix other than rewriting everything from scratch in software.

7

Thanks for your patience. This will be fixed in builds 2025.31894+.

It’s possible you can avoid it for now by using the Audio Stream In CHOP as well, as another option.

8

Thanks a lot, Malcolm! I will check the build.

In case someone else has this problem for now: I got the FileDownloader in TDResources to work. That is downloading the file async and is not blocking TD.