Hi Josh -
One other question for you. I have been reading the reviews of these tablets on Amazon, and it appears that many other apps appear to be working on these tablets (eg. Skype), would you happen to know how these apps resolve the audio issue?
Thanks,
Andrew
Interesting. A quick google search shows that some people are reporting the exact same kind of crash with Skype on Android.
http://community.skype.com/t5/Android/Crash-on-opening-Samsung-Galaxy-Tab/td-p/1995615
I’m surprised to see that someone on that Skype forum thread reported this issue on a Galaxy Tab, because we know that OpenSL can load successfully on that device. But then again, I don’t know if we can 100% trust that he is running into the same issue and might have some unrelated crash. Although, it does make me wonder if this is not a device/model specific issue and this might be something worse… like a system corruption issue.
The only other solution that I think we can implement is for us to do the following. If we detect that the OpenSL library exists, we can write to file that we’re attempting to load the library. If we successfully load the library, that we write to file that it can be loaded successfully. If we crash, then the next time the app starts up, we can then identify that the library cannot be loaded and fallback to a different Android audio API which unfortunately has higher playback latency/delay, but at least it would work on the offending devices (better than always crashing). The only bummer about this solution is that it’ll still crash on the first time you run the app, because I’m not sure how we can predict if it’ll crash or not (corrupted library?). But I’m not sure what else we can do about it at the moment.
Out of curiosity, are you able to reproduce this issue on any of your devices?
I assume not, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Yeah, I have been able to reproduce it consistently on the Dragon Y88, I have also just ordered a Noria to confirm the issue there.
On the Dragon device, I was able to recreate the issue by literally having just this in main.lua:
local function main() local introVoice = audio.loadSound ("Voice\_PuzzingoTheGreatestPuzzle.mp3"); audio.play(introVoice); return true end main()
I would be happy to ship you a device or swing by and drop one off for you to try (I am in Sunnyvale).
Your idea sounds reasonable, since I would expect most people to at least give something a second try “just in case”. But that assumes you can tell that the crash is caused by this issue and not something else?
Yeah, given the issue you described, I was expecting lots of mainstream apps to fail on these tablets, but what’s weird is that many apps/games still seems to work. For example, we’ve tried Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, and the feature review on the Dragon tablet on Amazon has a guy playing Subway Surfer…
Andrew,
If you’re willing to drop it off at our office, then that would be a big help. We’re a bit too busy this week (we other commitments to complete first), but I’ll see about scheduling a time for you to swing by next week if that’ll work for you. Thanks for offering. It would indeed be great to finally lay this issue to rest.
Josh
For sure. Some of my colleagues are driving by Palo Alto today and tomorrow. I am going to ask one of them to drop off the Dragon tablet at the Corona office. You can keep the tablet for as long as you need. We will come by and pick it up once you are done.
Thanks!
Andrew
@ Josh - I just want to follow up to see if you have have had a chance to duplicate the issue?
Thanks!
Andrew
Not yet. Sorry about that. Some other surprise issues got in the way this week that took priority… but I’ll bring this up again in our next team meeting for next week. I want to see this issue get resolved too.
Thanks Josh. I appreciate it!
Josh - sorry to keep bugging you. Just want to check in again to see how things are going and if there is anything we can do to help.
Just FYI. We just bought a Noria tablet and confirmed that the same issue exists there.
Not yet, other than we agreed that this is the next priority issue to be resolved.
Thanks Josh!
Hi,
This issue has been fixed and will be in build 2267.
Thanks Josh & dchan! We really appreciate it!
Andrew,
Just curious if you were able to confirm that this issue is fixed on your Noria tablet?
If so, then we’ll close this issue out on our end.
And thanks for letting us borrow your tablet. We’re ready to give it back to you. Feel free to swing by our office to pick it up. Afternoon on a weekday would best. Thanks again!
Yes it is! We’ve just confirmed it. Thanks a bunch again!!
I’ll drop by sometime next week in one of the afternoons. Will let you know. thx!
I can come by tomorrow between 5:15-6PM to pick up the tablet. Will someone be around? Can it be left somewhere for me?
My email is akao@77sparx.com, we can take this offline.
Thx!
Andrew
That time is perfect. See you then.