Mp3 playback stuttering over SMB

[slantedview]

I posted about this on the Kodi forum a year ago and aside from finding several other users with the same issue, it appears unresolved:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=220850

Basically, mp3 playback stutters over SMB shares. NFS is fine. Cifs is mostly fine. SMB is bad. I don't think it's a network issue since high bitrate videos playback just fine over SMB. But for some reason basic MP3s stutter a lot. Unfortunately SMB is what I really need to be using for most of my files.

I just installed OpenElec 7 beta 3 and the issue I'm having still persists. Any ideas on fixes or details I can post to help debug this issue?

[Muit]

I am having similar problems with my OpenElec installation:
=> OpenElec: 5.08 or 6.03
=> Rasberry Pi 2
=> Sound: Hifiberry digi+ (optical output)
=> Media source: NAS Lacie (100 MBit) or Synology 214 (1 GBit)
=> Sharing protocol: Windows or NFS

I have tried a lot of different setups, using different versions of OpenElec, different NAS, and different sharing protocols.
All of them, except one, gave problems with the playback of audio files, being seemingly random drop-outs of the sound during playback of audio files via the library. The combination that this not gave any problems was:
OpenElec 5.08 with Lacie and Windows network.
I have encountered exactly the same problem with OSMC after upgrading (including a upgrade to Kodi 15).

I have tried to switch on buffering (using buffermode in the config.txt), but this did not work as I expected, because it controls video buffering and I have the problems only with audio playback.
I have tried to playback audio files directly from the file menu (so not via the library) and this gave NO problems.
I have no idea why playback via my Lacie NAS gives no problems, while playback via the Synology (over the same network) gives lots of problems. The only clues I can give is that the Synology is 10 times faster then the Lacie. Also switching from Windows to NFS introduced extra problems.

I have read that switching from the default audio player in Kodi (paplayer) to dvdplayer could solve this problem, but I have not tried this yet. This can be done via the advanced settings (see kodi.wiki/view/advancedsettings.xml section 2.2.3).

So far my experiences with this problem.