UI Keeps Locking Up

[dewdude]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is a bug with the program, incompatibility with my phone, issues with my BT headset, or issues with my collection. As a result..I've posted this here; many apologies if I should have posted elsewhere. 

I recently decided to retire my iPod and just go the smartphone route. I picked up a 200GB microSD card to hold everything and I've converted all my music to either 80kbps Opus for general stuff or 256kbps Opus for my "audiophile" releases (SACD, Gold discs, HDTracks). OF course, I've also spent the last week fixing the tags and album art so I can play/navigate my music the way I'm mostly accustomed to. I have a lot of compilation discs with various artists and I not only wanted this to work "properly" using a library (which...I've never used a library/database feature so it's taken me over a week to get close to finished on that front). I'm normally a minimalist when it comes to music...I use Foobar2k on my PC...90% of my stuff does not have tags...and I am mostly a folder/file browsing type of guy. My previous iPod ran Rockbox...which I still used in a folder/file method but I had a giant playlist that contained *everything* on the player that I could either shuffle and listen to randomly...or turn off shuffle and jump back to chronological order. One of these things you hear a song and realize you might like to listen to the rest of the album..even if you're halfway in. I realize I could still do it the old-fashioned way with a playlist on the phone...but I can't escape library function anymore...plus I do really like how GoneMad organizes everything. 

The problem I'm having is the UI locks up. I'll be listening to music, I'll wake the phone up...the lock screen player is stuck on about 4 or 5 songs back. I try to load the app itself....it too has a frozen timer...is 4 or 5 songs behind...and doesn't respond. Then the UI goes black...nothing. It's still playing...but I can't get anything out of the app. Then I get the thing from Android saying the app isn't responding. I tell it close...music keeps playing. The app doesn't appear to be loaded...but music is still playing. Trying to reload the app doesn't work. I typically have to reboot the phone to get the music to stop and use the program again. 

My phone is an LG Stylo 3 Plus from MetroPCS/TMobile...it's the slightly upgraded version of the LG Stylus 3 with HD screen and more ram on a Snapdragon 435. My headset is a Sony WH-1000XM2 Bluetooth Noise thing I bought because I didn't want to go Bose. The microSD card (if it matters) is a Sandisk 200gb that's Class 10/UHS1/A1. All my music was converted to Opus using either dbPowerAmp for stuff that was already FLAC/other formats...and I used Foobar2k to encode stuff that was in CUE/WAV(FLAC) or from SACD. Tagging was done (mostly manually) using MP3Tag. Album art, unless it existed or was low resolution, was added using mp3tag from discogs. 

So I don't have much of an idea of what's going on. I have an idea or two..and over this weekend I'm going to be spending some serious time putting effort into seeing if I accidentally solve it myself or at the very least can figure out what variable in my setup is causing it. But maybe if I throw these out someone will have an idea of if I'm taking the right path:

Headset controls: I don't know if there's something funky with the way the Sonys work or what...I have noticed every time it has locked up I've used the skip controls on the headset. Probably nothing...but is something I jotted down on my notes.

Album Art: I realized some of my album art is HUGE...like 1600x1600 and 3MB. I have noticed some lag and slight issues when GoneMAD has to play anything with this obscenely large artwork. Right now I'm leaning toward my album art being an issue...and I'm (moderately slowly) working through to lower the resolution and quality so that nothing is more than 600x600 with a filesize of no more than 80kB or so.

My Collection is too big: I do currently have 15960 tracks in about 3000 albums. As I've only noticed this when playing from the "All Songs" option...I'm wondering if the size of my library is such that GoneMAD is just having issues working with it.

I have a little over a week left on my trial...and while I do feel the program is fantastic and have no problems paying for it....I would like to figure out what this possible issue could be before I do so.

Thanks for any help/suggestions anyone can throw...and once again, many apologies if this should have gone in a different forum.

-Jay

[GoneMAD]

Headset controls: The UI only updates when its visible so if your screen is off and you are changing tracks with the headset controls, the UI wont update until it becomes visible again.. so thats probably why things appear a few tracks before. In every case i've ever seen, the UI updates within a second or 2 to show the right information.

Does only the album art not update or does the song info not update as well? Song info and album art are done independently of each other. I've never seen the song info not update, but i have seen the album art not update and thats typically due to an error loading the image (typically memory related). GMMP uses glide for all its image loading / management.

Album Art: Large resolution images can definitely cause sluggishness or issues due to the large amount of memory it uses. A single 1600x1600 image is going to use roughly 8 meg of ram just by itself. Glide will scale the imagery to a resolution that is good for your display but it still requires the full memory to do the initial load

Large Collection: A large collection on an sdcard can cause some sluggishness in the UI. I have a moto x pure with a 400 gb sdcard filled with around 45k songs i think and some views take a little longer to load. .but never becomes unresponsive. Nearly everything in GMMP is done in the background so it shouldnt ever be the cause of unresponsiveness. If the device itself is struggling for resources it can cause the behavior you experience. The device you have only has 2gb of ram is definitely on the lower end for the resources you are demanding (large art with a large collection) and has a mid to lower range CPU (according to this link at least www.gsmarena.com/lg_stylo_3_plus-8694.php)

My suggestion would be lower the art resolution a bit and see how that goes. 800x800 typically looks fine and is lighter resource wise (2meg for an imagine)

GMMP's use was written like 7 years ago and was then skinned over a few times to its current state so it certainly could be written better.. which is why i've spent the last year rewriting the UI and large portion of the app for GMMP 3.0

[dewdude]

I had noticed the player takes a second or two to update after turning the screen on if it's been sitting a while...which is fine. But on three occasions it just degrades in to a black screen. It acts like it tries to update the art and the song info..but then it all goes black. No art update, no song info update, no ability to change views.

I'm currently in the process of working over all the album art. Right now I'm shooting for 500x500 unless the file size is particularly small. Thus far I've pushed a lot of them down < 50kb. This will probably take me a couple of days.

I actually haven't noticed any sluggishness with the library I have, even with some of the insanely large artwork. IT's been running fine most of the day in fact. But if you recommend 800x800 with no more than 2 megs...then I'm pretty sure most of my artwork at this point is less than that; so I may just skip getting everything under 80k and leave the stuff 600x600 or less and see how that works.

Thanks!

[GoneMAD]

so just an fyi the size of the file itself doesnt matter at all, it still expands to width times height * 3 bytes in memory. The size on disk / storage is the compressed version. It need to uncompress it to display it and for 24bit imagery (which is what most images are) its 3 bytes per pixel

[dewdude]

I got everything down to around 600x600 or less. It's done it twice:

last night in a sleep deprived state laying in bed I hit back too many times and wound up on the home screen, I tapped the icon on my home screen and everything went black. I could still track-skip..albeit it took 30 seconds to register. UI never came up. Had to force stop.

Just a few minutes ago I made use of the tag editor to update three files. After they updated I attempted to go back to the library and the program locked up.

I'm starting to think the problem is my phone.

[GoneMAD]

yeah most likely. next time it happens immediately grab a logcat and i can take a look at it. If the OS is trying to free up resources its usually pretty apparent from the logs.

gonemadmusicplayer.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-to-get-logcat-system-log-to-help.html

[dewdude]

Mar 31, 2018 16:28:10 GMT -5 GoneMAD said:

yeah most likely. next time it happens immediately grab a logcat and i can take a look at it. If the OS is trying to free up resources its usually pretty apparent from the logs.

gonemadmusicplayer.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-to-get-logcat-system-log-to-help.html

I would do that except it seems you need a rooted device to do so...and it has to be connected to the computer to do that.

My device is not rooted and I'm not near a computer when it happens. I'm usually lying in bed or out in public somewhere. I do have an extra Stylo 3 with a busted screen I might be able to root on....but given the fact even it seemed to have a different build than my current device it may not have the same issues.

I'll keep an eye out for 3.0 and give that a try when it comes out. I really do like the app much better than the other two that actually play my music. I'm finding so many media players that claim support for Opus yet doesn't seem to recognize them. I'm somewhat convinced LG screwed this device up as well (my last LG device didn't have working GPS due to a manufacturing flaw they refused to recognize).

The crashing wouldn't be such a huge deal except I'm prepping this for my vacation in June...in which I will probably spend 36 hours running around Nevada and California; so stability is important since I don't want to have to reboot while on the interstate.

Thanks for your help though. If I can manage to get a logcat of when it crashes...I'll come back and let you know.

-Jay

[GoneMAD]

nope to either. your phone is 7.0 which works fine. you can do it straight from the phone

it says "If you are rooted you can follow the instructions for 4.0.x and below." the 4.2+ instructions work on any phone over 4.2

[dewdude]

I missed that. My brain was frazzled from working on fixing art/tags for 16ktracks/900+ albums. I was practically a zombie. In fact, I just walked away from the whole project for a few days because it was starting to consume my life..haha.

I'll look over those instructions again and see if I can't get a valid logcat. I like how GMMP does things vs the current player I'm using.