I've uploaded the first beta for 1.3 (and if all goes well, the only beta) which includes the new music player backend, you can download it from
here. You can happily install it over 1.2 and when the final version is released update via Google Play.
Please take the time to test it and give me feedback, please post either if it works or if it doesn't work, its very important that I build a picture of how it behaves on different devices as differnt versions/manufactures have slightly different behaviour.
I need to know the following information:
Phone make and model:
Android version:
Rom: either stock, or if a custom one, which one
I'm specifically interested in:
a) Does it play music (I hope so)
b) Is there any iteruptions in a single track, e.g. it briefly pausing, if so how often (test on Wifi and 3G ideally). If there are it should only be on tracks that were not prefetched. Either way please report if it works/doesn't
c) Does it ever get into a state where it stops playing, and if so what did you do to get it there (if it does, menu->shutdown music player, then menu->music player-> play should fix most problems).
So whats new in this version:
*I'm downloading the music manually and feeding it to the media library from the SD card
*This means that music is now cached on the device which really makes a difference after a while. However, the cache is currently unmanaged so can get big, use a file manage to prune it out for now if you have limited space.
*I prefetch 1 track in advance for reduced gap between tracks
*Lots of files that wouldn't play before, now play
*You can skip around very long tracks
*But I now have to be very careful about managing the state of the player
What I haven't done yet, but hope to do for 1.3:
*Transcoded audio doesn't work (although it didn't previously)
*I need to put a limit on the cache size, and prune it in the background.
*Resume downloads if possible when the connection drops
*Improve prefetching (I'll ad an option to configure how many tracks to prefetch, and also re-evaulate prefetching when the playlist changes)
*Fix stuttering on JB
*Tracks with no metadata (no artist/album), are stored as MEDIA_ID - TITLE.mp3, in future I'll put them in their original folder structure
*Better error reporting, before it just wouldn't play, I will be able to say if it is an authentication problem, a network problem, or an incompatiable file
Even if you don't use it for music, please have a go as I won't be able to return to other improvements until this is done. Hopefully I can get 1.3 out by the 17th, but otherwise it won't be until the beginig of october.