New languages helping

2.3.8 has been out for a couple weeks now and the language distribution has changed. Now that we have French, and the app description is also supported in French, French has become the #2 language for the app. Above is the latest snapshot of active installs by language. Total installs is now over 11,000 and active installs over 3,100.

There have been complaints from users about the SMS reader not working. I saw this happen on a friends Droid X with a T605 car kit. It kept asking for a TTS engine to use. There is something wrong with his TTS engine setup. I am just using the Android TTS services. A2DP Volume does check for a valid installation and it tests to ensure it is initialized properly before reading SMS. In his case, it kept asking for a TTS engine to use, as he had 2 installed. Issue 72 on the issues list has this issue captured and I will work to resolve that.

2.3.8 Published to Android Market

Finally published this update to the market. There were 10 test versions between 2.2.4 and this version as we were cleaning up translations (many thanks to Uwe and Sebastien), the text message reader, and a few other reliability and performance improvements.

Go here to get it:

https://market.android.com/details?id=a2dp.Vol

I tested with Droid 2 and Droid 3 using a Motorfola T605 car kit and a Motorola HF850 car kit. All worked well. Music paused, SMS was read, then music resumed. I tested all 3 streams as well. Unfortunately this is one of the challenges with an app of this nature, it is hard to test all the phones, tablets, and Bluetooth receivers out there. As always, please post any enhancement requests or defect reports to the issue list here:
http://code.google.com/p/a2dpvolume/issues/list

Here is a capture of the statistics just after publishing 2.3.8.


lets see if this changes now that we added French and there is French description info in the Android Market.

Audio Manager issues

I have been struggling to get the text message (SMS) reader working well. It works fine when I send the Text-To-Speech (TTS) to the music stream and you are using the default music player. It will pause the music, play the TTS, and then resume the music. If you use most other players (like Winamp or Amazon) it does not work properly.

If you use the in-call stream, it seems to work great on the Droid phones. However, some devices using Android 2.2.0 will reboot when the TTS is done playing. They also won't play the TTS (it appears muted). Even on the Droid's something strange happens. It all seems fine until you disconnect from the device. Then your streams all go to the phone earpiece instead of the phones speaker. A quick reboot fixes it but that is very annoying.

I added another stream selection, the alarm stream, to 2.3.7. That one works quite strange. It will play through the phones speaker even when connected to a Bluetooth handsfree and A2DP device. OK, so maybe that is not so bad. However, it never pauses the music, it just permanently mutes the A2DP stream after playing the TTS.

I tried capturing AudioMode before, and then restoring after but it made no difference. I have tried reordering the calls, disabling each call one at a time, etc. I have scoured Stack Overflow and of course Google. Not sure I can totally fix this now. I have read the documentation and examples several times. It appears the audio focus has many strange bugs. Maybe it is all a timing issue? I just implemented the on focus change listener but I have not really put any code in it as I did not really see the need. Maybe I need to have this listener look for the state change before progressing to the next audio manager command.

One other strange thing I noticed is when using the in-call stream if I try to pause the music right after the TTS gets done it will keep restarting by itself. If I wait a few seconds its fine. This is part of what makes me think it could be a timing issue. Also, I used the alarm stream and it muted A2DP as explained above. Then I switch it to the music stream. After the next text was read, the A2DP stream worked fine again. So, when I make a audio focus call again, it seems to move the streams around fixing or breaking things

I am testing on both a Droid 2 and Droid 3. Both have Gingerbread.

Thoughts anyone?