Pandora on the EVO

[Mr. Ed]

did you see.. that pandora is applying for IPO for $100mil stocks.


Mr Ed.. have you tried a new ROM.. maybe something in your old setup that is causing the issue. I am running Myn Warm Z.. a Desire Z port of Froyo and new Sense.

all week long .. no issue.

Several roms...same issues.

 

[dan330]

I have the newer EVO.. one with H-ON.. that needed to get new rooting method.

it also have the new camera.. that is in the 004 build.
and required that I wait for new kernels before I can try custom kernels and not loose my camera function.

maybe there is something in the newer versions..
I am just taking guesses....

 

[cmanbrazil]

Start off saying I love pandora. I have been very disappointed with the R&B selection on Sirrius, so creating my own stations on Pandora is a much better option.

I think the sound quality is decent, and the app works more than it doesn't, but like everyone else the problems do exist, and for me show up out of nowhere. I have driven two hours from northern to central Ohio, with few problems, only to be home in 4g heaven, and have days where it never seems to finish a song.

I paid for the app, and look forward to them fixing the issue. I still love it though for what it offers.

btw the tune radio is nice. My wife is from brazil, and we found many stations from the country, and a few from Rio. The additional infor on the app is nice as well.

 

[Palmetto Fellow]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but pandora is the only music service that has anything as sophisticated as the human genome project. It does not simply play contemporaries of your chosen music but it analyzes the music and seeks out music with similar acoustic qualities. I have discovered LOTS of artists that I like whose names I never would have found by selecting the music myself. Using rhapsody for example means putting together your own play list. All the radio station apps that simply replay radio stations across the country will never be able to offer what pandora can.

I for one don't want an alternative to pandora. I just want pandora to work properly. This latest version seems to have fixed a lot of issues. I left work early friday, so I have yet to test the skipping problem myself during rush hour on I77 south where I can't finish a single song. On monday, I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

 

[Mr. Ed]

^well said. But even that is lacking lately. I have found lately that some of my favorite stations are just loopibgbthrough the same 25 songs or so. I use the bookmark button heavily

 

[Mr. Ed]

I have the newer EVO.. one with H-ON.. that needed to get new rooting method.

it also have the new camera.. that is in the 004 build.
and required that I wait for new kernels before I can try custom kernels and not loose my camera function.

maybe there is something in the newer versions..
I am just taking guesses....

Logging with alogcat is a very simple process. We would love to see some logs if you have time to post them.

At one time I thought it was phone specific but the issue is now showing up on the aria and my friends g3. On tmobile.

 

[dan330]

i guess you want that of when I listen to music all day?
give me a quick instruction to do that and I will.

 

[Drew5150]

I'm still trying to figure out retro radio. its not perfect thats for sure. I felt the sound quality was way ahead of pandora. but the streaming feels more live with some interruptions. it plays just fine while at work on 4g, I'm not sure how good it will be while moving.

also there are a lot of songs played that I don't like and there seems to be no way to skip them.

at first I felt that the station choice was limited. but after searching through the shoutcast section there are a lot more options. guess it will take me a little while to find my station.

yeah pandora still wins for being able to make your own station.

I'm a sirius subscriber and love it. evo is the first phone that I have owned that can play pandora. well technically the second, but it was a complete joke on my old instinct so it doesn't count. and I can honestly say it doesn't come close in sound quality or reliability for me to drop service yet. I am bummed that sirius dropped my free internet service. kinda sort of considering adding it for the android app. though I really think that is a waste and I can just play mp3's while at work.

I'll give the new pandora a try next week. man if pandora could sound as good and load as fast retro radio without skips (an occasional skip is acceptable) then I would pay a monthly fee for it and drop sirius. doubt that's gonna happen tho

 

[snowscum]

Internet radio site Pandora filed late Friday to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering.

This offers the first public look at the company's finances -- and Pandora isn't yet profitable. The popular site posted a net loss of $328,000 on revenue of $90.1 million in the first nine months of its most recent fiscal year. In the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2010, it lost $16.8 million on sales of $55.2 million.

Its biggest expense is the royalties it pays for the music it streams. As Pandora's audience grows, so do those costs, which reached $45.4 million in the first nine months of 2010 -- twice what Pandora spent on them in the same period a year earlier.

 

[dan330]

so.. how long can the keep doing what they are doing?

 

[Mr. Ed]

Lol...drew my instinct played pandora flawlessly.

Did some testing here at home today. Over wifi quality was great...no skipping. Over 3g quality was awful...it is definitely being adjusted based on connection type. no skips during the 20 min time period it was on 3g.

Snow that is a very informative post. Its been the story with pandora for years though. The point of the genome project was not to become millionairs at all....but they do have to pay the bills.

In the end I would gladly pay for their premium services...if they can get the dang thing working properly.

 

[Drew5150]

Lol...drew my instinct played pandora flawlessly.

so not fair pandora would usually just freeze on the loading screen for me. and when it did play the volume output was very low, at least in my car. I actually think that my instinct may have been a faulty unit. cause it did most things bad. slow internet, horrible call quality. but it was leaps and bounds a head of my at&t phone here in the bay area for reception and drop calls, so I just kept it.


Pandora is local here, my friend interviewed for a job with them a couple of years back. They never gave him an offer, probably couldn't pay him what he needed.

yeah I would gladly pay for a working pandora.

has anyone tried to play pandora through their browser?

 

[Mr. Ed]

^I would believe that. My instinct was replaced 5 times lol.

I have never tried through the browser.

Started using slacker today. it skips as well. quality is much better...screen interface is super sensitive.

retro..awesome idea...but appears to be early in it's development. It needs a quit button, and had trouble maintaining a stream (at times took 15+ minutes to regain)

 

[Mr. Ed]

so..continuing to play with slacker as I have time (better weather = better pool business so I will be on less and less as the season changes)

I find it interesting that when slacker skips...the error is almost identical to the error logged while using pandora
D( 405) [U5B] pause (706) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] pause_l (712) (AwesomePlayer)
I( 2713) MediaPlayer release() (MediaPlayer)
D( 2713) unregisterHDMINotification (MediaPlayer)
I( 2713) Default buffer size used in BufferedReader constructor. It would be better to be explicit if an 8k-char buffer is required. (global)
E( 2713) status: UNPLUG (HDMIStatusObserver)
E( 2713) onEvent: false (HDMIStatusObserver)
V( 405) disconnect(16) from pid 2713 (MediaPlayerService)
D( 405) [U5B] reset (383) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset_l (389) (AwesomePlayer)
W( 405) Event 168 was not found in the queue, already cancelled? (TimedEventQueue)
V( 405) stop (AudioSink)
V( 405) close (AudioSink)
D( 405) [U5B] reset_l (479) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset (383) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset_l (389) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset_l (479) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset (383) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset_l (389) (AwesomePlayer)
D( 405) [U5B] reset_l (479) (AwesomePlayer)

so...is it stagefright that is causing the issue. I know that at one time it contributed to the quality issues but thought google had fixed it and we received the fix in an update.

I found a thread on a droid forum back from october november saying to disable stagefright but then later to re enable after an update they received. I also recall reading about disabling it several months ago...just after we got 2.2.

I honestly never thought about revisiting that information until today.

I am not suggesting you disable stagefright..as it might have other adverse effects...but I have disabled it on my phone and am going to test pandora on the drive home from work and continue to test for a few days.

 

[LaFlavor]

Well, the new version seems to work for me. I haven't used it a ton, but there hasn't been any skipping the few times I have.

 

[Mr. Ed]

soooooo...disabled stagefright....

pandora
quality is friggin awesome again...not one single skip over a two hour period.

slacker
haven't tested yet.

adverse affects...none so far. all media players work fine. ringtones work fine. all sound related aspects of the phone are fine (so far) From what I am reading flash may be affected. Tested some video flash sites........hulu app...all work fine



so obviously the stagefright issue of causing quality and streaming issues...is still an issue. demon voice flash is not. m.youtube.com DOES NOT work. The app works fine
720 recording doesn't work (i think I found a work around below). so far this is the only two things I have run into that don't work. neither of which are used by me.

but this stagefright thing is only affecting some phones. why? no answer..I really need logs to see what is occurring on other phones. Vernoica's phone does in fact have stagefright, and it is playing pandora fine...nothing abnormal in the logs...when it throws the error it just picks back up.

I have had a half dozen ideas run through my head first being that since the information I changed is located that system/build prop that maybe some roms have edited information built in...but that doesn't explain the numerous stock users that voted they are having issues nor the fact that I had the issue on multiple roms.


one of the the original thread from back in August
Stagefright/Streaming Audio Fix Scripts to Enable/Disable on the Go - xda-developers

one from the nexus xda forum
[FIX] Fix poor AAC streaming performance (Pandora, Slacker, etc) on Froyo - xda-developers

I have a link to a droid forum as well..have to find it though


for interested parties this is what I did. There are other methods listed in the threads above, even directions to make an "on" and "off" widget

mount /system in r/w
navigate to system, then build.prop
long press build.prop and open in text editor
scroll down to the appropriate line
originally I edited media.stagefright.enable-player:true to false
after doing some reading I found that it would be better (fixes some borked things like 720 recrd)
to edit text media.stagefright.http:true to false..thus only affecting streams
settings>save and exit (it will now save, and create a backup of the original build.prop)
reboot.

I am still looking into changing the lib files to fix pandora, but apparently those files are already present. I need to do some more reading after dinner and on my day off tomorrow.

I am thoroughly confused by all of this...the issue was supposed to be fixed in the 3.29 update.


completely off subject... I have never looked at the build prop before...there are many presets in here that interest me...mainly video related like sound settings and fps settings for recordings...and they all appear to be too low.

 

[SamuraiBigEd]

OK, so what is stagefright?

 

[Mr. Ed]

Android 2.2 Platform Highlights | Android Developers

When originally implemented in 2.2 they dropped aacc (sp) codecs...later supposedly added them back in though it was never listed in the 3.29 update.

From what I understand...by disabling stagefright as the default stream method I have forced the phone to use the previous method...which is working flawlessly. Sounds as if I am streaming music from the sd card. And no skips yet on a phone that was previously skipping heavily.

 

[Drew5150]

OK, so what is stagefright?

its googles own media player freepine: An overview of Stagefright player

 

[Drew5150]

for interested parties this is what I did. There are other methods listed in the threads above, even directions to make an "on" and "off" widget

mount /system in r/w
navigate to system, then build.prop
long press build.prop and open in text editor
scroll down to the appropriate line
originally I edited media.stagefright.enable-player:true to false
after doing some reading I found that it would be better (fixes some borked things like 720 recrd)
to edit text media.stagefright.http:true to false..thus only affecting streams
settings>save and exit (it will now save, and create a backup of the original build.prop)
reboot.

yeah I did this too back when froyo was released. I also only changed the .http

I was going to mention this back when you switched to mikfroyo, but figured the new version of stagefright was supposed to take care of quality. I didn't really think about mentioning it for skips.

I have been wondering if some of the rom builders have used on older version of stagefright to get hulu to work.

hulu is stupid, I don't get why people want it so bad. the app is crap....

 

[Mr. Ed]

I had the issues stock as well though but wondered the same. What are the devs doing in their tweaks. The issue existed on the most recent stock rom though It was the reasoning behind me unrooting and then going through multiple roms when I started this endeavor

I too disabled it up until the update ...I had on off gscript widgets.

 

[Drew5150]

well I'm not really sure what they tweak. I always see, updated latest flash player to work with hulu. I'm guessing that may mean they update the flash player to work with an older stagefright version that is compatible with hulu. totally just a guess but would explain the lower pandora quality that we experienced (lower then the updated stagefright).

I'll have to set this up and test it out for skips. not gonna mess with it now though.

 

[Mr. Ed]

Another skipless awesome quality day woohooo

 

[EarlyMon]

When the final answer is incontrovertibly clear, I'd like to move those posts to a separate [SOLVED] thread in the Support area (with a tip of the topper to marc).

 

[Mr. Ed]

Unfortunately right now the only fix is only good for rooted phones...and does disable stagefright completely for any web stream.

I will keep you updated.