AirPlay provider shows wrong/stale album art on player

[jpaju]

Question

Is album artwork supposed to update on AirPlay receivers when tracks change? I'm seeing stale artwork that never updates.

Setup

• Music Assistant version: 2.7.3
• Installation type: Docker
• Players (all via AirPlay provider):
  • Bluesound Node X
  • Bluesound Pulse M
• Music providers: Spotify, SoundCloud

What I'm seeing

• Album artwork on AirPlay receivers is stuck on an old track
• This same wrong artwork shows for ALL tracks played
• Track title and artist update correctly between tracks
• Music Assistant UI shows correct artwork
• Home Assistant MA media player entity shows correct artwork
• HA media player entities (via Bluesound integration) show wrong artwork
• Native player apps (Bluesound app) show wrong artwork

What I've tried

• Restarted MA server - no change
• Updated MA multiple versions - no change
• Disabled crossfade - no change
• Checked for "flow mode" setting, as it's mentioned in the docs to affect the metadata. Can't find this option it in player settings

Questions

1. Is artwork supposed to update via AirPlay/RAOP protocol when tracks change?
2. Is there a known limitation or setting I'm missing?

Related issues

• Bluesound provider doesn't provide correct metadata #3105 suggests AirPlay shows artwork correctly (recommends it as workaround for Bluesound provider)
• Slimproto / Squeezebox not displaying Cover Art #2483 confirms AirPlay showed artwork when other protocols didn't

These suggest AirPlay should work, but it's not for me.

[OzGav]

Try the beta to test as a lot of changes have been made to AirPlay

[jpaju]

Beta version did not fix this

[danielpetrovic]

Running 2.7.6 but it started happening some versions ago within the 2.7.x releases.

I am using the KEF LSX II, KEF LSX II LT and KEF XIO over AirPlay.

Not sure if my problem is related to the same. For me it doesn't update any metadata, just the track progress. But the longer I have music playing the bigger the delay is. If I play music for an hour for example, it can be multiple tracks behind where it is actually playing. If I skip the track it directly updates and pushes to the track that was in queue at that time.

The delay is actually also shown within MA itself and in HA, but as I only use AirPlay players for the easy multiroom/sync/group/ungroup I cannot see if it's AirPlay or MA related or both.

I switched to the new Smart Cross-fade and love how it works. It is also 99% stable without stopping playback, which I did have issues before with the original Cross-fade methode. I tried with the old and Cross-fade disabled and the problem also occurred then.

I switched to 2.8.0b12 for now and will see if the issue is the same.

[danielpetrovic]

Sadly, the same seems to happen on 2.8.0b12 . For now I will stick to the beta as it will be iterated faster.

After an hour of playback, the delay in refresh of track data is about 1min behind of the actual track switch. So the position in the track is not accurate at all.