Can Android Auto list performance be improved?
I have my whole library synchronized to my phone from iTunes via doubleTwist Sync and I'm playing with doubleTwist Pro. The intent is to replace my iPod Classic 160GB. I often travel where there's bad or no signal, so cloud streaming, etc. isn't really a great solution for me.
I currently have about 2000 albums across about 19000 songs. Sync took several days to complete the first time, but so far I'm really liking the setup.
I use Android Auto and one of the things I've found is that listing albums isn't really possible with that quantity of albums. If I try to go to the Albums list, I just see a spinner that never actually displays the album list. Same thing with Artists - spinner, but never shows up.
I'm curious if anything can be done to make these things work.
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Android Auto seems to have significant performance issues when handling large numbers of items. This can be anything from a large playlist, a list of all the songs in your library, or even a list of thousands of albums. Android Auto requires the app to deliver the "full" list of items in one go, rather than let's say a page at a time, which can result in memory issues.
You could try sending us your logs right after you encounter this, but we're pretty limited by Google's poor Android Auto choices until they offer better ways to handle large data sets.
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Man, that's too bad. I'll see if I can get logs.
Would it be possible for something like... If doubleTwist sees more than X entries in the list (for some reasonable number of X) that it could switch the UI to be nested alphabetical folders? Like instead of the whole album list, folders for A through Z. Or maybe even arbitrary pages ("A - C") depending on the data set size. I dunno, maybe too complicated? It'd just be nice to be able to nav my whole collection.
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One workaround you could try right away would be to create playlists with smaller number of items (say a few hundred). This would help bypass the issue until Google comes up with a more robust architecture or we find a way around Google's limitations.
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Oh, that's a great idea! I'll try that. Thanks!
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I've been trying this workaround and it's fairly painful. One of the biggest problems is that I can't create a playlist of albums, so I can't, say, make playlists of all the albums that start with a given letter. I can make playlists of songs but that doesn't help if I'm trying to find a particular album or artist and play their stuff.
One thing that may actually solve this: Search as a top-level feature in Android Auto.
At the moment, when I use Android Auto I have two options:
- Use voice search at the top level - this invokes Android Assistant and may or may not actually just find results in doubleTwist. For example, if I search "The Greatest Showman" it tries to play the movie rather than finding the soundtrack.
- Try to use the menus (Playlists, Podcasts, Artists, Albums, etc.). Those have search inside them so you can narrow things down from there... but you can't get to the search until the list renders, and if the list never renders, you can't ever search.
If there was an entry on the menu list that would just be search - and have it find results in playlists, artists, albums, whatever - that would actually solve the issue. I could search for an artist, select that artist, see their list of albums.
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>If I try to go to the Albums list, I just see a spinner that never actually displays the album list. Same thing with Artists - spinner, but never shows up.
Same problem here with ~1200 albums.
>Android Auto seems to have significant performance issues when handling large numbers of items.
Can not confirm this! I tested two other Android Auto compatible music players (rocket and musicolet) and both show the album list without any delay. There must be something different in doubleTwist. I can provide tests / logs if it helps to fix this issue...
Best
Daniel
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I messed around with Rocket Player and it seems the way they handle large lists is to show the first few items (say, 30?) and then have at the top a "Search by Letter" feature. I think this would be a good way to handle it - I don't necessarily need all the albums to show up in a list, but being able to select an album to play from Android Auto is definitely something I'd like.
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I confirm the poor performances of CloudPlayer with Android Auto. I've got a large collection and it's simply impossible to load Artists/Albums/Titles on my car's headset (Hyundai GD-03). I suspect a state management issue... alternately, could a UX change do the trick, like paginating with a "load more..." button ? Building smaller playlists can be a workaround, or asking someone not driving to use CloudPlayer in the phone instead, but that defeats the purpose of Android Auto.
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