start to play with headset button

[zamzon]

First of all: The player simply is GREAT! I love it and use it several hours each day.  It is the only one able to handle my collection of >100k tracks.

Two issues:

• (minor:) The download of album art got re-enabled after some update (->mobile traffic)
  
• The start of play when device is locked (display off) with the remote play button (any wired headset) works strangely most of the time:
  When the player had been stopped for longer time (some minutes) the first press of start does nothing at all; the second press starts playing of music for only about halve a second and only the third finally get's it going. This does happen with or without the the stamnia mode but not with other players. The phone is a sony xperia Z1 compact with android 4.4.1 and the behavior is since i know the player (several months). Rareley there there is a audible message like "..need to unlock.." Can you do anything about this?

Thanks!

Kind regards,

Thomas

[GoneMAD]

1) I didnt touch anything with that setting so the update itself did not turn it back on. The only way i can force a setting to be on again is by changing how the preference is stored behind the scenes, and that was not anything i've done in any of the 2.0.x updates
2) That is not the behavior of GMMP, so something else must be interfering with it. Assuming the music service is running, when it receives the play command it will start playing.. now the play command actually has to get to the player.. which it sounds like its not doing. Its up to android to correctly deliver the commands. The "need to unlock" message sounds like something specific for your phone as there are no audible messages within gmmp

[zamzon]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply!

2. But it seems, that it has to do with GMMP and play list (with AAC? on external SD?):
First I installed GMMP on another xperia and tested with only one MP3 album from internal SD card: all fine!
Than I installed the SD card with all my music (100k tracks in AAC) and activated a playlist with 2000 tracks and voilà: the described behavior can be observed on another device, too!
I guess there it is some timeout or race condition, which causes the first play not to work (out of standby). Than the second press just fully wakes up/enables playing engine but also causes immediate stop/pause a few ms later. And than finally the third press works correctly as play command, cause the device hasn't really been in standby as before. Just a theory..

3. BTW: when I insert the SD card with 100k tracks and start GMMP, it blocks for several minutes with black screen and Adroid offers 10 times to kill it. At that point I didn't even told GMMP to scan the SD card. I guess it waits for android media task, which tries to scan the SD card despite the .nomedia files and folders starting with a '.' And Android also drains halve the battery. Afterwards GMMP does start up and the scan can be initiated.

Thank you!

Kind regards,

Thomas

[GoneMAD]

i have 60 some android devices and i've never had problems with the play / pause. The functionality is super simple, if it receives the command it will play or pause depending on what the current playback state is, there is nothing else to it.. so yes it could be that for some reason your phone is putting the music service in a state that it cannot respond to commands and the first time your phone is possibly reviving the process?

Basically nothing actually runs on the UI thread in GMMP so it should never hang, so yea it sounds like your phone is basically halting everything while its trying to scan the sdcard

[zamzon]

I've got a Xperia device fresh from factory (not used, nothing installed yet).
Do you want me to test GMMP on this device with a playlist of files on internal SD card?

Thank you.

[GoneMAD]

you can try

[zamzon]

Using a very new sony Xperia Z ultra with orig. Sony headset, playing MP3 files from internal "SD card":

• With Sony Walkmen/Music App Pause/Play with headset button works as expected.
  
• With GMMP same behavior as on other devices: first press: nothing, second: short sound, third: finally playing. Sometimes even five key strokes on headset button are needed (three ignored).
• Needed Pause for malfunction: 30secs (in standby, screen off).
• Small queue (20 files) seems sufficient for malfunction.
• About 1500 files are in Library.
  

Please let me know, if you need more information for fixing the issue.

Thank you!

Kind regards,

Thomas

[GoneMAD]

the sony xperia z ultra is a 2 year old device.. new or not it still has its issues. what happens when the play/pause button is pressed is up to the phone. it needs to relay the correct intents. There is unfortunately nothing i can do if those intents do not get received by gmmp. If you can someone find some proof to show gmmp is getting the messages and ignoring them. then i'd definitely look more into it, but i cannot fix issues with android itself

[zamzon]

Thanks for your reply! You wrote:

"There is unfortunately nothing i can do if those intents do not get received by gmmp"

But they get received, I'd say. Otherwise the second press of the button could not stop the "badly" started playback.
This issue just demonstrates again: Nothing is to simple, to fail..

And the problem is the very same with a phone running Android 5.02! Also to old?
And it does not happen with other audio players! It obviously has nothing to do with the HW. Not even with Android I'd say.

What other facts do I need to present, until you investigate this issue?
How many malfunctioning installations of GMMP on "new phones" do I have to find? How "old" may they be??

PS: the mentioned "you need to unlock" audible message only gets issued, when I hold the button for longer (Google NOW jumps in, I'd guess)

Regards,

Thomas

[GoneMAD]

I was talking about the other presses that do not do anything. If gmmp would receive them it would start playback right away. The code that handles remote controls is extremely simple and has not changed in years, its very well tested which is why I can say with 100% certainty that if its not starting playback after a press, its because it never received the message. Other apps can intercept button presses and android itself could be killing the music service (That happens a lot in android 5.0 due to the overly aggressive memory management). I have 60 some android devices that I regularly test on which is why i say this things with such confidence

The only thing i can suggest is grabbing a logcat and emailing that in

[zamzon]

Jul 6, 2015 20:35:03 GMT -5 GoneMAD said:

The code that handles remote controls is extremely simple

Then the code it probably is too simple. Other players are reliably able to start playing from standby.
Maybe some checks are needed to ensure system is already able to start playback after wake up?

I'll try to create a log file and send it to you.

Thanks.

Regards

[Frankied]

Hello, I have an Xperia Z3 device and I see the same issue as described here. I have tested PowerAmp, and other players and they always work when the play/pause is pressed using a wired headset. I tried with screen off and screen on and if the app has not been opened prior to the wired connect/disconnect the button from the headset does not work properly. I double checked all settings to make sure the focus for wired headsets was enabled and tested it multiple times with the same result.

[Frankied]

Forgot to mention that the audio files are Opus files from a 32GB SD card.

[zamzon]

@frankied: thanks a lot for seconding my findings and providing the information! 

I guess the behavior is not easing to find/repeat, cause for example if USB is connected for debugging (e.g. to logcat with adb), the phone seems not to enter sleep mode (the same way?) and the problem doesn't show up.

Further tests:

• There is at least one other player (Neutron), which has the very same behavior.
  
• Jet audio player on the other hand works as well as the Sony player (Music) and the other names players.
  
• The needed pause time, where the phone enters (deep?) sleep, where the first play doesn't work is only about 5 seconds.
  
• Sometimes more than three (but five) key press are needed, which than also changes played track.
  
• Type of file seems not important (happens with .mp3, ogg or m4a)
  
• storage seems not important (happens from internal or external SD)
• There has never be any other headset HW (e.g. BT ) or headset control app on the phone (Android 5.02)
  

Please find attached a few logs. In the last one I tried to add the information on keys/events.

Please tell me, if I should do other test/logs.

Kind regards,

Attachments:

LogCatPausePlay.zip (87.33 KB)

[GoneMAD]

sounds like something specific to sony devices.. which i have none of that support the current version of gmmp (I have an xperia play but thats on 2.3). I will take a look at the logs.

One thing i know gmmp does slightly different from most other players is not define its intent receivers through the manifest but dynamically through the music service. This allows the ability to turn OFF remote controls and other features, customization which GMMP is based around. I dont know if this has any affect on how the remote buttons are handled

To comment on frankied's reply.. this is most likely due to the music service not running. The service has to be running in order for it to respond to remote presses, so GMMP must be active in the background... meaning the music service needs to be still running. Android 5.0 loves to kill GMMP in the background due to its (android's) overaggressive memory management. This happened with wired connections on my n5 when it was updated from 4.4 to 5.0 (and then fixed when upgrading to 5.1). The only fix for that is to upgrade to 5.1 or downgrade back to 4.4. Regardless of how other players work, i cannot do anything about how android decides to manage gmmps processes once they lose focus (nothing short of ripping out functionality in order to lower its resource usage in hopes android will stop killing it)

The easy way to tell if the music service is running is just by looking at the running apps list in the system settings.. it should show if the service is running or not