topic Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause in XPERIA archive

3rd party music player skip and random pause

wizlon — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:30:29 GMT

I am an app developer of a music app called "Car Music", which is available in the Google Play store (I won't provide links as I don't want to look like I'm advertising) and I'm having a problem with my app on my newly purchased Xperia Z2.

I will first start by saying that I haven't had this problem on any other handset I've used which includes a Samsung Galaxy Note II, Asus Nexus 7, HTC Nexus One, Samsung Ace 2 and a Kindle Fire HDX. Which leads me to either believe it's a problem with the Android build on the Sony phone or another app running on the Sony phone.

Ok, down to the problem. When my app is playing music and the screen is on, everything is fine. But when I turn the screen off, things start going strange, the music pauses randomly, the music skips randomly, the music stops before the end of the track (usually by about 2-3 seconds) and then moves onto the next track, new tracks sometimes start 1-2 seconds into the track and lastly sometimes the current track will finish and the next track won't start until I wake the device. All of this happens seemingly randomly, but always when the screen is off (actually, this isn't necessarily true as I have had my app skip, but I have also heard this happen in the walkman and the google music app).

Does anyone know if this is a problem with the phone, the android version, any other software on the phone, or does my app have a genuine bug? If no-one can supply an answer here then I will try the question over on StackOverflow, supplying more technical details.

Thank you for your time.

Andrew

Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

Sam — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:23:34 GMT

Hi and welcome to the community! Since you're new please be sure that you have checked out our Discussion guidelines.

This could be tricky to narrow down, however we will start with the easy ones. Do you have Stamina Mode turned on?

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Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

wizlon — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:30:08 GMT

Hi Sam, thanks for your assistance.

No, I have not got stamina mode enabled.

I have low battery mode on (although the battery was fine when I was encountering the problem and therefore this mode shouldn't have been active) and I have location based Wifi on.

As suggested by someone elsewhere on the forum, I disabled the walkman app from the applications list, which has made things a tiny bit better (less skipping).

The main problem i'm seeing now is that after a few tracks of it working fine I'm getting an issue where there is a cut off before the end of the track, but the time the audio isn't playing is offset by the time until the next track starts. It's almost like the audio manager is muting the music at "track time" - 2 seconds, retaining the playback state and then unmuting the track when the next track starts.

I'm going to disable any sort of sound enchancement mode and test this again, but it really sounds like there is a bug somwhere in the Sony mediaplayer implementation, probably caused by changes to the code for the Sony sound enhancements.

EDIT: I have disabled all Sony related settings I can see regarding sound and power management. One baffling problem which persists is that at the end of a track the next track sometimes won't start until the screen is turned on. I'm planning on putting a bunch of logging into my app to see what is happening, but until then, any ideas?

Edit 2: It seems that the longer I listen using my app, the bigger the gap between the audio cutting out and the next track starting. But again, it seems very intermittent.

Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

Sam — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:39:49 GMT

I'm sorry to say but have just gone through anything I would have normally advised to troublehsoot this and my application development skills are quite limited so I am not going to be able to offer much further insight on this. I have used a large number of third party media players before without encountering this problem so it must just be a case of something conflicting with the Walkman/Sound Effects process.

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Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

wizlon — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 09:11:34 GMT

Would you be able to give my application a test (a free version is available) I just need to now if this is something wrong my my app or my phone.

Would it be worth doing a system reset? Would that help in any way?

Edit:

I decided to go crazy and perform a Factory Reset so see if that would help in any way and to see if the problem is stock or caused by an application. After performing the reset I installed my app from SD without chaning any settings or linking any accounts or downloading any other applications. After around an hour of listening I haven't come accross any problems with playback, everything is working as expected.

This afternoon I'm planning on connecting up my Google account and performing Sony app updates to see if the problem rears it's head again. Fingers crossed it was just a crossed wire (?) with the previous install, perhaps caused by updating from a previous verison of Android.

Edit 2:

So, after everything was working just great, I decided to finish setting up my phone with all my accounts. And wouldn't you know it, after setting up my Google account, the problem resurfaced. I set up my account, updated the google play service, turned on Google now and the music started stopping before the end of the track again. I tried uninstalling the update to google play service: nothing. I then turned off google now: nothing. I then disconnected my account: nothing. The problem still remains. I decided to reboot my phone to see if the problem goes away. We'll see soon perhaps... nope. Still problems. I'm going to uninstall updates one by one to see if the problems go away. To me it seems like a a conflict with a Google component.... but which one?

Edit 3:

I know you're bursting to know my results so here we go. After multiple restores and tests it seems like the problem lies with Google somewhere, every time I had things working great after a restore, but as soon as I connected my account and started downloading new software and connecting to google plus and now, things went wrong. I'd love to know what is happening, but I'm spent.

Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

Sam — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 23:53:29 GMT

That is certainly a strange one, however with you having narrowed it down to Google Service conflict I would also expect to see the same error on other Android devices running the same Android version. Have you been able to test that at all?

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Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

Zann_H — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 02:48:33 GMT

I'm a programmer but I've not steped into Android yet. But from waht I can tell, the issue is most likely lies with some of your code and Google framework. My suggestion is to go to XDA forum(if you haven't already) and post your questions there. The developers there are always wiling to help out and you would get faster & better results rather than stack overflow. Some of them would even be willing to go thru your code if you don't mind sharing them.

Good luck!

Re: 3rd party music player skip and random pause

wizlon — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 14:05:33 GMT

After some scrabling around deactivating bits of code I think I've got to the root cause of the issue, I'm still not sure why it was working until I activated with Googles servers, but I do know where the problem is, I've just got to do a bit more digging to sort it out.

One of the problems was around passing an empty bitmap to the remoteview controller when setting the lockscreen controls, the other was cuased by acessing the network to download album art. As I say, I still haven't fully sorted the problem, but at least I know where to look now.

Thanks everyone for your help and patience while I rubber ducked to you.