Help Problems playing music - Jumpy audio

[drapacioli]

So, having gotten rid of my iPod touch to buy the Captivate, I kind of wanted to use the captivate as an iPod Touch replacement. I use the music player all the time, but I've noticed recently that when I play music through the headphone jack and even sometimes on the speaker, the audio skips sometimes, especially when I accidentally place the phone so that it rotates the screen to landscape (anybody know of a way to force portrait mode? I hate landscape mode in the stock player, but I like the EQ settings, very easy to work with, and it has a nice widget integration in the lock screen) It never matters what type or bitrate music is playing, it just seems to lag, almost as if the CPU is being used by something else. I've had this same problem playing HD videos, but much less often, but because the HD video is much larger and takes up more CPU power to run, I can assume that lack of processing power or SD card bandwidth is not the issue. Anyone else have this problem and/or can help me solve it? I didn't have this issue in the short period of time that I had my motorola backflip btw (horrible phone, imo. Glad I got rid of it)

 

[sremick]

Well, since Android is an actual multitasking OS, this cuts both ways. Some background app is using too much CPU at those moments, taking enough away from the music player that it can't keep up with clean playback.

The Captivate's filesystem "lag" issue doesn't help here, unfortunately.

The trick will be figuring out what app. Might take a lot of trial and process of elimination. Maybe it's when it tries to sync your Google account? Or check your email? Or download news/data for some other app? Luckily there are lots of free system/task info apps out there to help. Watchdog Task Manager might come in handy here.

As far as rotation... you can turn off auto-rotation in the preferences, and then use some other utility. Like maybe this:

Smart Rotator - Android app on AppBrain
Rotation Toggler - Android app on AppBrain

 

[drapacioli]

Well, since Android is an actual multitasking OS, this cuts both ways. Some background app is using too much CPU at those moments, taking enough away from the music player that it can't keep up with clean playback.

The Captivate's filesystem "lag" issue doesn't help here, unfortunately.

The trick will be figuring out what app. Might take a lot of trial and process of elimination. Maybe it's when it tries to sync your Google account? Or check your email? Or download news/data for some other app? Luckily there are lots of free system/task info apps out there to help. Watchdog Task Manager might come in handy here.

As far as rotation... you can turn off auto-rotation in the preferences, and then use some other utility. Like maybe this:

Smart Rotator - Android app on AppBrain
Rotation Toggler - Android app on AppBrain

I'll try watchdog for now and see what it gives me. I can safely rule out Google account sync because I have disabled that in the preferences. Email I'm not sure about, I set it to check once every hour but I've received alerts much closer together as well. As for the rotation, thanks for the tip, I will try one of those apps, that may help more than the CPU and filesystem lag.

 

[drapacioli]

Well after disabling auto-rotation it seems to have gotten slightly better. Now I only get tiny blips every now and then, and it seems to be the filesystem lag that does this, as I haven't gotten a single alert from that watchdog program, and the idle percentage is almost always >40% when I'm playing music, therefore it is not the CPU being taxed. Must be the filesystem or perhaps a bug in the music service. But at the very least it is manageable now.