Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 50 posts

Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#1
As computing power grows, smartphones should theoretically encounter fewer and fewer stutters. However, at least on the phones I've used, which are iPhone8 Plus and Pixel 7, stutters still exist during music playing (even with the phone put in sleep mode). And I don't think it's only the case for the phones I've used.

The sources of the stutters I can come up with are:

1. all available LITTLE cores are busy and at least a task wake up in the meantime. 2. the CPU scheduler doesn't schedule properly (from the user experience perspective). 3. music player doesn't advice itself as latency-sensitive app.

It's easy for modern smartphones to have ready_to_run_tasks (daemons) > available_cpus, and a CPU scheduler which ignores latency-sensitive apps can easily preempt the music player.

To sum up, user experience is probably the utmost thing that modern phones care, how can things like "stutters during music playing" happen? Can't we just defer those daemon tasks?

(maybe this is why my collegue got a MP3 player instead)

Re: Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#2
I don't think any of my phones, iPhone or Android, have had hardware-related issues during music playback. I have had:

- faulty 3.5mm jacks on certain headphones causing intermittent cutout

- buffering pauses for remote libraries/streaming (eg. YouTube or Spotify)

- Bluetooth/codec issues, where the proper codec isn't negotiated and "headset" mode stays on

That being said, I don't stream FLAC and my library is <10,000 songs. Maybe you've got a big library?

Re: Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#3
> how can things like "stutters during music playing" happen?

Good question.

It's nice that streaming works at all, but a lot of things have to be working underneath. I wonder how a DJ would set things up, even if that's not my use case. What MP3 player did your colleague get?

Re: Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#4
One of the media players I used (on Android) had a bug in which it was susceptible to getting put to sleep when in the background - it would promptly be reawakened by the player service, but that would cause a glitch each time (especially at the transition between tracks). Once I removed the player from the power optimization list, the glitches evaporated entirely. Maybe something to look into, since it's a different cause than the three on your list?

Re: Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#5
post #2

I don't think any of my phones, iPhone or Android, have had hardware-related issues during music playback. I have had: - faulty 3.5mm jacks on certain headphones causing intermittent cutout - buffering pauses for remote libraries/streaming (eg. YouTube or Spotify) - Bluetooth/codec issues, where the proper codec isn't negotiated and "headset" mode stays on That being said, I don't stream FLAC and my library is <10,00…

Nope, mine is a playlist with only 3 local-stored tracks. Yes, I loop these 3 tracks all the time.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#6
You have to take enshittification into account. My phone is probably thousands of times more powerful than a computer from 2 decades ago, yet I still chose to get an iPod recently, and my listening experience on that has been significantly better. I could go on for hours about this topic, but I'll keep it brief. Application specific devices are always going to beat smartphones. Smartphones can do everything, but they can't do anything -well-.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't modern smartphones play music smoothly?

#9
I don't think my pixel 6pro stutters unless there are Bluetooth issues. I used it cycling and listening music for many hours, and if music was cached, no issues. Sometimes there are issues with Bluetooth and streaming, but I think I can tell these apart from other stutter.
Post reply on HN