Android - Play/Queue Entire Folder/Album

[jm9843]

Hi guys,

I'll try to explain why there are occasional stutters when playing the currently downloading track.

Let's say that you start playing when 500kB has been downloaded. The Android media player will then stop after 500kB have been played back, even if the file has grown to 1000kB in the mean time. Hence, I have to reopen and restart the player at the position it was. This takes a few milliseconds and causes the stutter (and also the notification btw).

Thanks for the explanation Sindre, it's nice to know why this is happening. Do you have any ideas on how to circumvent this problem or are we going to have to hope for an improved Android media player?

I know nothing about Android development so I'm sorry in advance if I'm completely off base but would it be possible to pass the length of the song in bytes (provided to the Android client by the server if using cbr transocding or no transcoding at all) to the setDataSource method when initializing the MediaPlayer object before starting playback? Or are you already doing something similar? If I were to guess, I'd assume that the call to setDataSource is only passing the file-path currently?

Alternatively, for the people really bothered by the stutter, an option to delay playback until the first song in the playlist has completed downloading might help to alleviate their concern.

Thanks again, - j.

[alphawave7]

Hi guys,

I'll try to explain why there are occasional stutters when playing the currently downloading track.

Let's say that you start playing when 500kB has been downloaded. The Android media player will then stop after 500kB have been played back, even if the file has grown to 1000kB in the mean time. Hence, I have to reopen and restart the player at the position it was. This takes a few milliseconds and causes the stutter (and also the notification btw).

On the first song, it's not unusual to have as many as four skips during the current playback tune..is this from the completion of the first tune download, the seed to download the next, etc...? Any clues as to why the Android player stops playback? Any way to stream directly to the player? There HAS to be a way to resolve this issue.

[H CL]

Please, has there been any word on resolving this? Even on a low bitrate I hear this "stuttering" all the time. This android app is completely unusable to me until something is worked out. For that fact, why isn't everyone posting this issue?

[sindre_mehus]

There is a possible work-around that I'm going to experiment with. I can't promise anything with respect to time, but I can assure you that this bug has the highest priority in the Android app.

Thanks,
Sindre

[H CL]

Thanks for the response, I appreciate your dedication to your software. If it helps:

I have tried the app on my verizon droid and t-mobile g1 (I have never modified the roms on them). I have connected to both my WHS (hp ex485) and the subsonic demo servers. In all cases the playback stutters, from what I can tell, in the same way. I tried connecting to wifi and still got the problem. I have even tried removing all widgets and killing non-essential tasks. Still the same. Let me know if you need any additional information.

[alphawave7]

Yesterday I installed FroYo 2.2 on my Nexus...and one of the first things I tested was Subsonic. To my surprise..the skipping in the initial song download no longer exists! No more hiccups and spurious notifications...Google might have fixed this nagging issue once and for all. Couldn't be happier..for all of us Sub-heads.