Android 2.0 / Droid support for Subsonic Android application

[benster]

First of all, I just found this today when looking for a streaming solution similar to something I used on my iPhone (which I sold this week after getting the Droid last week). This is just awesome - I will be donating very soon, assuming there are good answers to my question (and I'm sure there will be).

When I run the Android app on my Droid, it works most of the time. However once or twice when the phone slept it went into a coma mode and wouldn't come out of it - I had to pull the battery out and reset it that way. I could hear beeping when I hit certain buttons but the screen never came back. The music also stopped at this point. Sometimes, however, the music streamed fine - I just played 5-6 songs a bit ago waiting for it to mess up and it never did. I don't have a reproducing case yet but will be trying to pay attention closely in the next few days assuming that it will happen again and I can get some information about it.

So, my question is whether or not there are plans for supporting Android 2.0 / the Droid. I haven't seen this mentioned on the forums at all. If these one or two moderate bugs were taken care of this would be absolutely perfect.

Thx in advance...

benster

[mluhring]

benster,

I too have a Droid and I have been using the android app for about a week and have not had too many problems. All my music is in mp3 format. I am transcoding on the server to not stream more than 128kbps. I get an occasional skip in the music, but that usually seems related to the fact that the file has not been fully downloaded yet. After playing awhile I have a good cache of music and am no longer streaming. the music is being played from files cached on the phone.

After playing for a long period it is a good idea to clear out the cache of files on the phone. Hopefully there will be better cache managment on the phone to delete files that have been played or to limit the size of the cache.

I also ran into a problem with large playlists. I had trouble loading a playlist with 1500 songs, but 800 loaded fine. So, I just made a bunch of smaller playlists.

Mark

[benster]

Thx for the info, Mark. You know, maybe I spoke too soon - I have had zero problems since the first couple of times I ran it. Now, I didn't imagine the two lockups so *something* was going on, but I'm cautiously optimistic that the app might be fine.

BTW, I have a very large library with no playlists. I play music by the album so I just navigate there and go. I only use something like this when I want to listen to something specifically - otherwise I use Pandora or Last.FM. However, it's invaluable because I go through stretches where I only want to listen to older records that I have.

My music ranges from a whole lot that I ripped at 128 early on to later Amazon MP3s at 320. I've had no issues with skipping or anything and I'm transcoding down to 128 as well. I did see the blurbs about caching and hope that will get tighter as well.

Overall, if it keeps working this well it's looking like there should be no issues... I'll be donating soon.

benster

[mitchm11741]

I have a lot of files on my server too... something like 250+ albums with several thousand individual songs. First, I am guessing you have observed it is pointless to hit the My Music button with this size library. I usually get a time out message connecting to the server. Second, if I search for an artist for whom I have several albums, I only get a short list of ~ 20 or so tunes to show up. The Droid app really needs to be improved. It would be nice to have control over the time out setting so, if I were willing to wait, my full album or artist list would download on demand.

[benster]

I've actually got 27,000 songs and every time I hit My Music it comes back and navigates pretty quickly for me over both 3G and WIFI. It's actually significantly faster than Simplify Music was for my iPhone which makes me very happy as my only gripe with it was navigation speed. Honestly, I haven't had a single timeout when tapping a button in the app - just the couple of lockups early on but none since.

Yes, the search could be improved (being able to click on an artist returned to go to their albums, searching for albums and not just tracks) but it does come back quickly. I'm hopeful that improvements will be made there. There could be some settings I'm not aware of, as well - I'm completely new to Subsonic.

All in all it's working fantastic for me now. I'll be donating very soon...

benster

[DBerglove]

Just to confirm Bensters experience. I have 43,274 tracks in my library covered by 2,476 artists. When I hit 'My music', I am amazed by how fast the Droid app is. It only takes 3-4 seconds to parse through all of the artists. As a Simplify user, I am very excited about the speed of the Droid app. I am looking forward to a few more features as the whole Android experience matures.

[mitchm11741]

I ran a few tests on my home network and hardware and have figured out the culprit. I had all my music loaded on an NAS drive. I ran an experiment loading a subset of my music onto the local hard drive in my server. Performance improved radically. Next, I installed a new large, fast hard drive in my server and loaded all my music onto it. After indexing with Subsonic, my system now really kicks! Works great on my Droid now too.

So, moral of the story... seems to be that their was some kind of latency in my use of an NAS drive mapped to my server. BTW... someone more technically savvy than I might actually get the NAS thing to work. For $100 and 20 minutes work, my problem is solved.

[benster]

Awesome - great news Mitch.

Even better, I have yet to have the app crash since those first couple of times. It's working perfectly and I love it. I love to see the experience I've had be mirrored by another old Simplify Music user - that makes me feel that I'm not just seeing things with respect to the speed of the Android app.

benster

[hatzie]

Awesome - great news Mitch.

Even better, I have yet to have the app crash since those first couple of times. It's working perfectly and I love it. I love to see the experience I've had be mirrored by another old Simplify Music user - that makes me feel that I'm not just seeing things with respect to the speed of the Android app.

benster

Former iPhone Simplify user here too. I have to say the Droid with Subsonic is just great.

[librainian]

I just found subsonic this weekend while i was searching for a way to enable my wife to browse and sync files on my media server with her droid. I have to say it only took an hour or so to get things working to her satisfaction. I've since purchased a license and tried some remote streaming which worked like a charm. I am already thinking about a jukebox implementation connected to my main stereo and the droid as the remote. So far I'm pretty impressed with how easy it was to get started.

A couple of minor annoyances I couldn't find mention of. 1. Whats with all the empty album folders left on the phone after browsing around? Shouldn't they be removed unless you have downloaded content? I tried clearing cache but this has no effect. 2. I think the tracks are always in alphabetical order instead of track order. Is there some way to change the sort order on the droid app?