Music Player - glitchy with m4a?

[kenrothman]

Hi, first post here.
Anyway, got a Captivate on day 1, and mostly love it, coming from my iPhone 3G.
Since i'm coming from the ipod world, 99% of my music is in m4a format... mostly 160 or 192 kbps.

Currently using the standard "music player" app that came with the phone, and finding it pretty glitchy during playback... seems to skip a lot, for lack of a better word.

Anyone have any advice? This is really annoying. Will another music player change anything, or do they use common services for decoding? I'd like a relatively no-frills player, preferring sound quality over fancy features. only fancy feature i need is lock screen controls.

 

[Chew]

It stutters for a lot of people, and it's not just the included player (or just m4a)

http://androidforums.com/samsung-ca...-playback-stock-player-samsung-captivate.html
http://androidforums.com/samsung-captivate/136252-music-jitter-skipping-revisited.html

Apparently, rooting plus SetCPU will fix the problem. I'm not quite to the point of rooting just yet.

 

[dontshakepandas]

Try Mixzing in the market. It allows you to change the buffer size to try to eliminate the skipping problem. I have recently switched to Mixzing from Cubed and haven't experienced any skipping like I did in the stock player and Cubed. I couldn't use the stock player anyways since it would force close every time I tried to sort my music by artist.

Mixzing also has a nice lock screen widget. (limited use with the free version)

 

[thejtl]

Try Mixzing in the market. It allows you to change the buffer size to try to eliminate the skipping problem. I have recently switched to Mixzing from Cubed and haven't experienced any skipping like I did in the stock player and Cubed. I couldn't use the stock player anyways since it would force close every time I tried to sort my music by artist.

Mixzing also has a nice lock screen widget. (limited use with the free version)

Awesome that it's working for you. I got Mixzing and set the buffer as high as it would go and I still had terrible trouble.

I chatted with someone at Samsung today and they had me do a soft reset (take the battery out) and that seems to have helped, but I'm going to listen more today and see what happens.

I'm giving this phone the rest of the day and if it doesn't get better, it's going back. I've had buggy performance all day today. It even crashed on me. Ugh. this feels like driving a sports car on flat tires.

 

[Chew]

I tried MixZing when I was first having the problem, but didn't know about the buffer settings.

I'll give that a try, thanks!

 

[dontshakepandas]

Also, I'm not sure if it has made a difference in this, but it may have so I'll go ahead and ask.

Have either of you done the stage 1 speed fix for the captivate? It really made a difference in the feel of my phone, and it was really easy to do. To me it is logical that if it made such a huge difference in the rest of the phone, it could have easily improved the music playback as well.

thejtl specifically, it really should change that whole sports car on flat tires thing you are feeling. Not sure if you are still using touchwiz either, but if you are, please give launcherpro a try before you give up on the phone.

 

[Chew]

That lasted long. I'm still getting skips with the higher buffer settings in MixZing.

 

[Chew]

Have either of you done the stage 1 speed fix for the captivate?

I'm not convinced I'm going to root.

 

[dontshakepandas]

I'm not convinced I'm going to root.

Why is that? It is incredibly easy to unroot if you ever need to (like 3 adb commands) and nobody can ever tell it was rooted in the first place.

 

[Chew]

Your "easy" is my "what the?!?".

I don't know the first thing about command line.

 

[dontshakepandas]

Your "easy" is my "what the?!?".

I don't know the first thing about command line.

Haha, I know how you feel. I really don't either, honest. I just followed the directions step by step that I found on here. Took like 5 minutes. I was just testing to see if it actually worked. I really can't think of any negatives to being rooted though, since it is so easy to go back if you ever need to. It REALLY opens this phone up.

Either way, I hope you get your music troubles figured out. I converted my entire library to MP3 while I was waiting for this phone to become available so I haven't tried any m4a files. I'm so happy to get rid of the iTunes lockdown that came with my iPhones.

 

[rlb4]

I converted my entire library to MP3 while I was waiting for this phone to become available so I haven't tried any m4a files.

Do MP3's play better(no skipping) on the Captivate than m4a files? What did you use to convert them?

 

[dontshakepandas]

Do MP3's play better(no skipping) on the Captivate than m4a files? What did you use to convert them?

Not sure, I don't have any m4a files to try, but now that I'm using Mixzing it sounds great.