Strange problems and maybe a strange workaround

[zeckeh]

First of all thanks a lot for this great player. All the built-in professional features reflect the work of a true music lover. I'm really looking forward to the tablet enhancements in version 1.5.

Unfortunately I'm experiencing some strange issues and before I go mad I thought I ask you and the forum for advice. I'm a fairly skilled Windows user but a newbie to Android. Maybe I overlooked something?

I'm running GMMP on a tablet with an ARM Cortex-A9 Dual Core 1,5 GHz, 1 GB DDR III and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. I assume this is enough power for all the nifty features? If I can trust my task manager my CPU usage is about 30% (with GMMP running) and it shows about 600MB of free system memory.

I began with scanning my collection (> 35k files plus album covers) and everything worked perfect. But: As soon as I tried to play the first song GMMP crashed immediately to the desk. I began to dig deeper in the settings and followed your guide to reduce audio skipping and stuttering.

I noticed the following behaviour:

# Enabling either the equaliser or replay gain or crossfading or gapless play makes GMMP crash. Adjusting the Playback Priority or the Decoding Priority (and all the other millions of possible combinations ) unfortunately didn't help. Without these features enabled GMMP works like a charm.

Is my device really too weak to handle that? Or at least one of those features? Crossfading would be nice...

# The strange thing is that I maybe discovered a weird workaround for the equaliser problem. Or does JellyBean come with a 10 band EQ, too? This is what I did:

> Enabling the EQ in the settings (for instance with 10 bands) > than I went back to the EQ tab itself and - voilà – it was there and I could choose a preset > went back to the settings (without trying to play a song) and unticked the EQ (the external DSP is also unticked) > playing a song now works perfectly without any problems. Changing the EQ settings is also no problem.

And I swear: 2 days ago a similar click-through orgy solved the problem with the crossfading but I can't reproduce the setting any more. Maybe there was something wrong with my last beer.

Any ideas, comments or thoughts on that (not the beer) would be very appreciated. But even without all the features I will buy the player anyway. BTW, someone in the forum of my favourite Windows player called GMMP the “Swiss army knife” of Android players. I totally agree and hope for the best.

Cheers from Germany

[GoneMAD]

What you describe sounds like issues with the custom audioengine i wrote.

If one of these options is on, it will use gmae (gonemad audio engine): crossfade, replaygain, gmmp eq, or gapless. If all of those are off gmmp uses the stock android music player for playback. Unchecking the GMMP eq setting will use the stock android equalizer. The number of bands for that various based on the device.

For android 4.0 and up, GMAE relies on opensl for aac decoding (m4a files) due to google removing the old aac decoder from the device that it was using for 2.3 and earlier. The problem is opensl is VERY buggy on many devices.. i've found custom roms and lesser known manufacturers have a buggy implementation of opensl which can cause crashes.

What is the device you have? If you are able to get a logcat when it crashes I could probably tell you instantly if that is the issue. Mp3 and the other formats should be able to play back fine.

The reason why I cannot include my own aac decoder is AAC and MP3 are heavily patented and for a 4 dollar app there is no way i could pay the license fees

[zeckeh]

Thanks for the quick reply!

The device I'm using is from "I-Onik" - indeed sort of a no-name product but with a reliable company behind it. But...

I have read about the opensl problem (it's unticked) - apart from that I'm not aware of having any aac encoded files. 99% of all my files are mp3s.

As soon as I know how to do it I'll send you a logcat. I hope the app "aLogcat" will do the job.

Thanks again!

[GoneMAD]

Thats really odd you are having issues with mp3.. but it could be that they decided to remove the mp3 decoder gmmp uses (this SHOULD be something gmmp auto detects so i dont think that is the case).

You can try toggling prefs -> audio -> enable opensl. GMMP can use 2 diff mp3 decoders so maybe one might work

Getting a logcat on 4.1 is a pain if you are not rooted (if you can email it to [e-mail]). If you are rooted you can use alogcat (i think) or catlog and just save it off. If you are not rooted you can check to see if there is a way to generate an bug report. Some devices have it in settings -> developer options -> take bug report. You might also be able to hold POWER + VOLUME UP + VOLUME DOWN to generate it (it takes awhile.. i've never really gotten this to work myself

Finally the hardest way to do it is to install the android sdk and use adb

forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1450553

[zeckeh]

Well... aLogcat did something. To me it's only Greek but maybe it worked.

I sent you an e-mail ("GMMP / zeckeh_log")

Thanks a lot.

[GoneMAD]

i sent an email back. i dont see anything obvious. the crashes are in regular system calls

[zeckeh]

Although we couldn't solve the problem (it's my device's fault) I'd like to say a big thank you to the developer for his prompt and patient help.

Keep up the good work!

[GoneMAD]

one thing i forgot to mention that if you disable gapless, replaygain, crossfade, and the eq (or just uncheck disable gmmp eq), gmmp will fall back to using the stock media player for music playback. This is the same thing the stock player uses so it at least makes the player usable.. although not ideal it should prevent the crashes