AVAudioPlayer on iPad Mini / Mini Retina

hcabral

I've recently purchased an iPad Mini Retina and something is bugging me in regards to how sound behaves. My Sparrow app runs normally on iPhones, iPads 1, 2, 3, etc., but on the iPad Mini Retina the M4A files I use for sound behave in an odd fashion.

Sometimes a sound simply won't play, and that's more or less random. Since I have events that are triggered on sound completed, you can imagine that it will cause weird things to happen on screen.

Today I will further investigate the issue and will post any updates. I'm using the "master" version of Sparrow, by the way, and it doesn't make a difference if the sound channel is created in memory or if it's created on demand, the bug will always show up.

Cheers,
Henrique

TTStu

Hi,

out of curiosity, can you reproduce the problem when using wav -> aifc files, or is it ONLY M4A?

hcabral

Hi TTStu, that's the kind of test I want to run. In order to ship the app, I'm working around the issue right now. In order to get COMPLETED events, as you must know, we need an SPSoundChannel, which is returned by a modified version of the Media class:

+ (SPSoundChannel *)soundChannel:(NSString *)soundName
{
    SPSoundChannel *channel = [currentlyPlaying objectForKey:soundName];

    if (!channel)
    {
        SPSound *s = [[SPSound alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:soundName];
        channel = [s createChannel];
    }

    NSUserDefaults *prefs = [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults];
    float volume = [prefs floatForKey:@"FX_VOLUME"];

    channel.volume = volume;

    return channel;
}

This very code works normally on iOS 7.0.4 in my iPad 3gen, iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, but fails with the iPad Mini Retina. Pretty weird, huh?

Daniel

Really odd that the new iPad Mini behaves different ... sounds like a problem with its audio drivers or something like that. 🙁

Did you find a solution?

hcabral

Daniel, no. As you can see, in some parts of my code I want the channel so I can tweak volumes, play with fade, etc. This static method works normally on all devices but in the iPad Mini Retina (I haven't tried the normal Mini). The channel simply won't play. Pretty crazy, right?

In this app (which I submitted yesterday, by the way) I used the channels to detect sound complete and thus trigger some other actions. I had to work around it by using the delayed invocation and timing it such that it would match a sound's playback execution. Not gorgeous, but it's just 4 or 5 scenes (out of 27).

Daniel

Very very odd. 🙁

To anyone else who encounters this problem (and this thread), please be sure to post your experiences! Perhaps there's something that can be done.