Audio problems on ICS devices

spaceneedle

I have ran GS apps on many different phones without too many problems, but for some reason, I get really glitchy audio on any device running Android 4.0.x (ICS). Has anyone noticed similar problems? Its not a particular situation either, its 100% reproducible from the empty template by just dropping in a sound.

More specifically: Just playing sound by itself produces lots of drop outs and popping, while music by itself plays perfectly fine. If you try to layer audio on top of music, the audio stutters in even spaces and effectively plays at half speed.

Is this a known issue?

skotleach

I had this issue on the kindle fire. My sounds played fine on the iPad and iPhone version of my game. I did as you and tested with a totally new project and had the same result; audio plays back with drop out and stutter.

The bad news is that I was unable to find a solution. I ended up importing all my sounds as music and triggered them with the play music behavior. Hopefully playing your sounds as music will work for your game. I know no other solution.

Holderness_Media_Inc

I have only recently started testing my apps on Android, but I had this same issue with audio running apps on my Kindle fire, which is a modified version of Gingerbread 2.3 as I understand it.
I tried everything under the sun to fix the audio glitching to no avail, but when I reverted the same projects to GS 0.9.91 instead of 0.9.92, the glitching and dropouts are severely reduced. It's not completely gone, but it's nowhere near as bad, whereas with 0.9.92 it was un-useable. I have been in discussion with GS about the issue so they are aware of it. Your options right now are probably either to wait for the next GS creator update, or revert projects back to 0.9.91 and publish from there.

Holderness_Media_Inc

Personally, I think it has something to do with using the .ogg format on Android. It could be the problem is when the .ogg format is decoding in realtime for playback, Android is struggling to do it fast enough, and there is where your source of the dropouts and buffer glitches lives.

Android is notorious for horrible audio performance and latency, that's why there's not that many music applications yet. Developers are waiting for Google to fix these problems.
Just my hypothesis, but I've dealt with tons of different hardware/software/file format combination issues for years, so I like to think I'm right in this case, haha.

spaceneedle

Interesting enough, i encountered another ICS device where there is no audio glitch issue. It is appearing more OEM/device specific than just a general platform problem.