Subsonic Android 1.1 released

[sindre_mehus]

Hi,

Version 1.1 of the Subsonic Android app was released to the Android Market today.

Streaming now works a lot better. Also, a new offline mode has been implemented.

Please let me know what you think!

Regards,
Sindre

[SabreCEO]

So far I can play variable bit rate songs, and all songs so far play to the end.

However, a new issue has arisen. Many songs seem to now skip for about a 1/4 - 1/2 second. Usually about 10 seconds into the song, then maybe once or twice after that... This wasn't happening before...

Also, I have one folder with 1,400 files in it. I can view it and quickly scroll through the first 300 or so as fast as I want, but after that it takes a couple seconds to change the screen at all and Android asks me if I want to close the program or wait for it to respond, so basically I can't really access any songs after the first 300. I'm not sure if this was happening before.

-Mark

[sindre_mehus]

Many songs seem to now skip for about a 1/4 - 1/2 second. Usually about 10 seconds into the song, then maybe once or twice after that... This wasn't happening before...

Yes, this is a side-effect of the new way I've implemented streaming. I won't go too deep into technicalities here, but the built-in streaming and buffering in Android didn't work well enough, so I've implemented my own scheme which buffers the stream to local files. In some situations it's necessary to pause playback for a short period while doing some operations on the files.

This will typically only happen with the first song in the play queue, since the whole playlist is eagerly prefetched - meaning that once track 1 is finished, track 2 is most likely already downloaded completely (depending on the available bandwidth, of course).

In addition, all songs that are streamed will be cached on the device.

Thanks,
Sindre

[SabreCEO]

Ok, that makes sense. I did notice that it usually happened only on the first song. I also noticed there is a delete cached option. Will the cache also automatically be deleted? Or will we need to regularly clear the cache?

If not, there might also be a few additional settings that should be added. For example limit the cache to X MBs that the user can set, and download at most X songs in advance. Without these two options what if someone has a folder with 1000 songs in it, selects all, and presses play? Even if they only listen to 30 songs there phone could wind up downloading and saving 5 GBs of data in that time! Which could cause various different issues.

Also, I was just wondering is this an intermediate release which just fixed streaming issues? As in, will there be another new release in the coming weeks with additional new features? Like maybe the ability to create a random playlist from Android, like you can in the web version

Thanks,
Mark

[tommy]

This is absolutely fabulous. With offline support, transcoded downloads, and really great streaming this is now my standard music player for Android. And best of all I no longer have any need for a syncing solution with my computer. I've made another donation because I think this is a great product.

[tommy]

Couple of comments:

My flac files are transcoded to MP3 when downloaded to my Android device, but the file extension is still ".flac" in the filename.

When MP3 files are downloaded it retains the original filename. By contrast FLAC files receive a new filename, the title of the track. Is there anyway to customize the filename?

None of this would matter to me except Subsonic seems to be sorting tracks by tracknumber. That's fine, of course, except some of my albums have multiple discs, in which case it needs to sort by discnumber then by tracknumber.

Is any of this making sense?

[SabreCEO]

After using the new version for a while I've found that usually more than just the first song in a playlist skips, and the first song (as well as others) usually skips more than once. It seems like a fairly significant issue to have songs skipping. Will this be something that will be fixed?

Thanks,
Mark

[Chris S]

The new streaming methods work much better, but I noticed that they are not available to other music players. I had previously been using the Download + Play option, and I liked the fact that I could also play those songs elsewhere on the device.

It seems like the tracks that are streamed and saved as .complete files are just normal mp3s with .complete added to them, but renaming to remove the extra extension doesn't allow them to be picked up as music files. What is different about these files aside from their download method? I'd like to be able to write a script to convert these files and make them recognized by any music app.

I realize that there is still the Save + Play option, which I think is just a renamed Download + Play, but I like using the transcoding options for faster downloads.

[krizze]

Simply awesome! Thanks, Sindre, I've finally ordered a unlimited data-plan on my phone, because this works like a charm!

One little thing: I miss the 'download' or 'save' button. I can click save+play, and then stop playback, but it would be nice to be able to download without playing sometimes.

Keep up the great work!

Regards
Kristian

[sindre_mehus]

My flac files are transcoded to MP3 when downloaded to my Android device, but the file extension is still ".flac" in the filename.

Will be fixed in the next release. The file is indeed an mp3, but the extension is wrong.

[sindre_mehus]

The new streaming methods work much better, but I noticed that they are not available to other music players. I had previously been using the Download + Play option, and I liked the fact that I could also play those songs elsewhere on the device.

...

I realize that there is still the Save + Play option, which I think is just a renamed Download + Play, but I like using the transcoding options for faster downloads.

Save + Play does what you want. It transcodes/downsamples and make the song available to other players.

[sindre_mehus]

One little thing: I miss the 'download' or 'save' button. I can click save+play, and then stop playback, but it would be nice to be able to download without playing sometimes.

Noted. I'll consider adding that in the next release.

Thanks,
Sindre

[justinf]

Simply awesome! Thanks, Sindre, I've finally ordered a unlimited data-plan on my phone, because this works like a charm!

One little thing: I miss the 'download' or 'save' button. I can click save+play, and then stop playback, but it would be nice to be able to download without playing sometimes.

Keep up the great work!

Regards
Kristian

Ditto on this. I generally use the app to download new music from my home server to my phone while I'm at work, but I use the internal player to listen. The download option would be great to have again.

[tommy]

Here's a weird bug, or at least something odd is happening. (Is there a page to report stuff like this?)

When I "play and save" a series of mp3s, and then open those mp3s with Android's native music player everything goes fine--the tags are all there. But then if I restart the device it looses those tags, giving me "Unknown Artist." This only happens with files downloaded via the Subsonic app. Any ideas why this might be happening?

[chris.h]

Here's a weird bug, or at least something odd is happening. (Is there a page to report stuff like this?)

When I "play and save" a series of mp3s, and then open those mp3s with Android's native music player everything goes fine--the tags are all there. But then if I restart the device it looses those tags, giving me "Unknown Artist." This only happens with files downloaded via the Subsonic app. Any ideas why this might be happening?

check your subsonic log. mine was telling me that the lame conversion process to a certain bit-rate was causing the id3 tags to be lost...