libspotify C sending zeros at the end of track - libspotify

Question

I'm using libspotify SDK, C library for win32.
I think to have a right setup, every session callback is registered. I don't understand why i can't receive the call for end_of_track, while music_delivery continues to be called with zero padding 22050 long frames.
I attempt to start playing first loading the track with sp_session_load; till it returns SP_ERROR_IS_LOADING I post a message on my message queue (synchronization method I've used, PostMessage win32 API) in order to reload again with same API sp_session_load. As soon as it returns SP_ERROR_OK I use the sp_session_play and the music_delivery starts immediately, with correct frames.
I don't know why at the end of track the libspotify runtime then start sending zero padded frames, instead of calling end_of_track callback.
In other conditions it works perfectly: I've used the sp_track obtained from a album browse, so the track is fully loaded at the moment I load to the current session for playing: with this track, it works fine with end_of_track called correctly. In the case with padding error, I search the track using its Spotify URI and got the results; in this case the track metadata are not still ready (at the play attempt) so I used that kind of "polling" on sp_session_load with PostMessage.
Can anybody help me?

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem and I think the issue was that I was consuming the data too fast without giving other threads time to do any work since I was spending all of my time in the music_delivery callback. I found that if I add some throttling and notify the main thread that it can wake up to do some processing, the extra zeros at the end of track is reduced to one delivery of 22,050 frames (or 500ms at 44.1kHz).
Here is an example of what I added to my callback, heavily borrowed from the jukebox.c example provided with the SDK:
/* Buffer 1 second of data, then notify the main thread to do some processing */
if (g_throttle > format->sample_rate) {
pthread_mutex_lock(&g_notify_mutex);
g_notify_do = 1;
pthread_cond_signal(&g_notify_cond);
pthread_mutex_unlock(&g_notify_mutex);
// Reset the throttle counter
g_throttle = 0;
return 0;
}
As I said, there was still 22,050 frames of zeros delivered before the track stopped, but I believe libspotify may purposely do this to ensure that the duration calculated by the number of frames received (song_duration_ms = total_frames_delivered / sample_rate * 1000) is greater than or equal to the duration reported by sp_track_duration. In my case, the track I was trying to stream was 172,000ms in duration, without the extra padding the duration calculated is 171,796ms, but with the padding it was 172,296ms.
Hope this helps.