Comments on: All the Music Apps for Google’s Android You Could Need

By: Bill Bartmann

Bill Bartmann — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:02:44 +0000

Hey good stuff…keep up the good work! I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks,)

A definite great read…:)

-Bill-Bartmann

By: flo

flo — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:06:58 +0000

This is why I prob. will return my android phone and then maybe get the new iphone, contract or not. It’s not just music and video (though those are annoying enough, and I didn’t find any apps equal to the iphone ipod.app) but for example try copying 1000 pictures on your sd card, and then time how long those thumbnails take to generate. unbelievably slow.

By: alistair

alistair — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:06:28 +0000

@David West
Yes a tracker program would be great and I have been searching but no luick. The g1 woudl be a great platform to write music on as you can jot music any where. There is a lot of source code out there for trackers but I would say that it would be a bit of a task to port it to the andriod platform
Cheers
Alistair

By: David West

David West — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:59:01 +0000

The android needs a tracking app like milkytracker (milkytracker.net) The g1 is the perfect platform for making awesome music with a tracker.

By: Miguel

Miguel — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:32:49 +0000

Hi Adrian,

just to say that I liked your article and to let you know there is another cool music player that I’ve founded for Android. It’s RockOn (http://abrantix.org/rockon-screenshots.php).

Best regards,
Miguel

By: AndroidTapp.com

AndroidTapp.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:18:43 +0000

I agree with Yoni. For a while I wondered why the Music and Video apps on Android were not as polished as others until I attended a developers conference and developers vented about some of the frustrations on Android. Their discussions about the Music and Video API was disheartening and some would touch an audio app until the API and documentation matures more. Not to mention theirs no native support for “Multi-Touch”, as you have to hack the OS… as multitouch supossedly violates Apples patent. I encourage developers to stick with it and are advocates as I run the leading Android App Review website, where the Music/Video apps have fewer numbers, but hopefully with SDK maturity, apps with evolve too!

By: Adrian

Adrian — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:10:41 +0000

Hi Yoni. Thanks for your detailed comment. You’ll be happy to know that I’ve been playing with RockOut during the week. As an Australian, I only seem to have access to the free apps in the Android Market, so can’t try out the new version.

Thanks for your explanation about Android’s audio limitations. I hadn’t realized. I hope for a smoother experience as they get the bugs out.

By: Yoni

Yoni — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:06:17 +0000

Thanks for the reviews! I’m the lead developer for RockOut, and wanted to play a little bit of the apologist here for my fellow developers of music apps.

While in many ways Android gives developers the ability to do things that are impossible on the iPhone, like running background processes, realtime audio generation and processing are actually extremely limited at the moment.

There are almost no exposed APIs for real-time audio on Android. That’s the main reason why, as you noted, a lot of apps have significant lag. This isn’t due to a lack of CPU power on the G1 (which is actually about equal to the iPhone in that respect) but actually due to incomplete/undocumented/buggy audio programming interfaces. There’s no way to process the wave data coming out of compressed files, no way to process live data coming into the microphone, and SoundPool, the realtime audio API RockOut and many of the other apps use, is very fragile and can crash the phone if you call some of its methods the wrong way.

A lot of these problems are slated to be fixed with new APIs and bugfixes in the upcoming Cupcake release of the Android OS and SDK (rumored to be out sometime in April), which should let us Android audio developers get a little closer to being able to do some of the things you can do on the iPhone.

Finally, a bit of news/self-promotion: since this article was written, the acoustic Pro version of RockOut is now available, and is the most popular and highest rated paid music app on the Android Market, so check it out!

Thanks again for doing this roundup, and cross your fingers for some great possibilities once Cupcake’s audio fixes hit.