Android player tip
Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2010 1:31 amThis may be helpful for those having some issues, especially timeouts, when trying to use the Android player...
Though I didn't have too much trouble getting the app to hook up to my SS server, I was noticing inconsistency in functionality. I could almost always download the artist list (in my case around 700 entries) and pretty rapidly. And not surprisingly, if the phone signal was too low, there would be timeouts. But I also noticed that the length of the album list within the artist made a difference: Even with a weak signal I could retrieve music where an artist had one or two albums but as the album count increased, the signal would need to be better or I'd end up with a timeout. I have a few directories that are things like "Soundtracks" with 25+ entries and these were never reachable via the app. And yet no problem using the web-based client. My music collection is on NAS so I tried moving the larger directories to the server. Problem solved. I also made some mods to the priorities for the router; that seemed to help too.
The moral of the story is that, while the web client is quite forgiving of various latencies, the phone app is not. In addition, how you have your music organized as recognized by SS can make a difference. So you may need to do some work at the server level to get the Android app to really work well.
For reference, I'm using an Android Eris on Verizon in Los Angeles
Though I didn't have too much trouble getting the app to hook up to my SS server, I was noticing inconsistency in functionality. I could almost always download the artist list (in my case around 700 entries) and pretty rapidly. And not surprisingly, if the phone signal was too low, there would be timeouts. But I also noticed that the length of the album list within the artist made a difference: Even with a weak signal I could retrieve music where an artist had one or two albums but as the album count increased, the signal would need to be better or I'd end up with a timeout. I have a few directories that are things like "Soundtracks" with 25+ entries and these were never reachable via the app. And yet no problem using the web-based client. My music collection is on NAS so I tried moving the larger directories to the server. Problem solved. I also made some mods to the priorities for the router; that seemed to help too.
The moral of the story is that, while the web client is quite forgiving of various latencies, the phone app is not. In addition, how you have your music organized as recognized by SS can make a difference. So you may need to do some work at the server level to get the Android app to really work well.
For reference, I'm using an Android Eris on Verizon in Los Angeles