Love the new Plexamp app! I have been wishing for such an app for mobile use for a while now.
Excited as I was to try the app, I installed it on my Nokia 6.1 (android 10 march security patch), logged in, selected the correct library, clicked play on an album I know by heart.
The music started playing, but troughout the music weird static sounding pops could be heard. The noises are very frequent when using the builtin speaker / headphone jack, a little less frequent when listening via bluetooth and almost eliminated (only the first few seconds of listening) when using my Audioquest dragonfly black 1.5 via an otg cable.
I have recorded a short bit of music playing on my headphones using a microphone. It’s from a piece called Fratres by Arvo Pärt (the weird pops are audible because it’s a quiet piece).
A cleaned up log file is also provided.
recording.zip (393.9 KB)
Plexamp.log (28.3 KB)
1 Like
I’ve seen this as well. Has been random for me. Haven’t found any way to reproduce it. Bluetooth totally unreliable for me. Constantly fails.
Interesting. How are your music files encoded? flac, mp3, etc? If they are, can you try something and go into Settings -> Music Quality and change Wi-Fi to 128 Kbps. Restart Plexamp and play something. This should start transcoding your music to Opus 128. I just want to see if this helps with the popping noises. Thanks.
My music is a healthy mix of alac, flac and mp3 in various bitrates. The pops are audible in all of them.
The transcoding to opus works, codec shown in plexamp is opus with the correct bitrate set earlier, the pops are also in transcoded audio, I used the library radio to circumvent cached tracks. A thing to note is that this only worked on cellular, on wi-fi it always direct plays (bug?).
I think the issue lies somewhere in the output stage, since it does matter if I use builtin vs external dac. One thing I noticed is that my external dac gets put into 48khz mode (blue ligt) instead of 44.1khz mode (green light).
Try reducing the pre-amp value in Settings - Advanced
The pops are with the preamp set to +0db still audible. I almost forgot, but sometimes (very rarely) the music seems to repeat for half a second maybe less in addition to the pops.
Weird, that sounds almost like vinyl record crackling.
The ‘snapback’ is not included in your audio example, right?
It does sound like vinyl, but I don’t have vinyl recordings in my libary.
The snapback is not included, those mostly occur after pausing it seems but I haven’t been able to reproduce them reliably.
1 Like
Do you have any system settings where you can enforce ‘power saving’ (or related) for apps in background? Try and toggle these.
(these are sometimes found among the general preferences of the device, sometimes among ‘energy saving’ and sometimes even in the properties of individual apps)
Did you start playback while other sounds were played on the device? (audio from other media players or during a phone call etc)
I toggled battery optimalisation off for plexamp and it didn’t make a difference.
Nope, no audio from other sources when starting playback.
I think the pops are randomly placed troughout the music. Every playtrough has differently placed pops it seems.
1 Like
Do other apps (that aren’t Google ones) also have this issue? After a bit of poking around Google there seem to be a lot of complaints about the update to Android 10 on the Nokia 6.1 and 7.1 family.
A user here is talking about a very similar issue when using BBC Sounds. I wonder whether it’s something wrong with the audio handling in the OS itself
It swapping the DAC sample rate to 44.1kHz outside of Plexamp is odd, as I would expect the system to run at 48kHz all the time, as that’s pretty common on most android phones that don’t have HiRes audio support (like the Sony’s do). I’m wondering whether there an issue with the OS resampling 48kHz to 44.1kHz less than elegantly.
I know of the existence of that issue, but haven’t noticed it in any of my apps before. I thought the problem had simply skipped my phone. I think it is the exact same problem as described in the linked thread.
I very rarely play games on my phone, I have now tested with the game reigns and it does have the same audio distortions (pops). reigns also puts the dac in 48khz mode.
I noticed the snapbacks only happen on my external dac right before the distortions stop.
The reason i mentioned the sampling rate is because the spotify app does set the sampling rate to 44.1khz. I have however very rarely seen it set to 48khz.
Most of the time my phone puts the dac in 96khz mode (pink) (the highest available rate). This also happens in the normal plex app in which I don’t hear any distortions.
I don’t know if there is a way to check sample rates of the builtin audio tough.
–EDIT–
Of course there’s an app for that, altough it doesn’t show current bitrate, just the supported ones.
Screenshot of sample rate checker app
Interesting, it does sound potentially like a sample rate conversion issue then, at OS level perhaps. I wonder whether Spotify directly takes control of the sample rate to work around potentially problematic sample rate conversion like you might be seeing here.
ME TOO. Plexamp, popping and crackling only with a wired headset. Bluetooth is fine. Here’s a heads-up for the Plex team. This exact same issue (same scenario) plagued the regular Plex app, when playing audio files (wired headset), way back when (likely, years). It was eventually resolved. Plex team, If you would, please, search out what that fix was, that was added to a Plex version release.
I did a quick search and found this entry… Static and popping while playing music after upgrading to Android Pie
Once again, Whatever the fix was in Plex may indeed be the fix for Plexamp.
None of my other apps exhibit this behavior.
I have the same popping problem with Plexamp, using Tidal as a source, whereas I don’t see any problem using directly Tidal app.
1 Like
Yep, I’m getting the same thing. It’s nothing on the source, I can play the same track from the same server using web or the Plex app with no crackling. Plexamp, crackling. Samsung Galaxy S9+ in my case.
1 Like
I’m having the same issue: pops, cracks, and short skips happen during playback. The majority of my music is FLAC, but it seems to happen regardless of encoding. This is on a Galaxy S9.
Edit: need to add I’m using wired headphones as well.
I’ve done some more testing and I agree, it seems to be some specific interaction between Plexamp and the hardware. The pops / crackles are completely gone when playing Plexamp over Bluetooth, and are also gone when playing regular Plex over wired. It’s only the combination of Plexamp and wired headphones.
1 Like
I am having the exact same issue with my Nokia 6.1 but not my Samsung Galaxy 9
Same thing. Pixel 3 I get random popping, not even in the same place if I replay the song. My audio is also very quiet compared to other apps
1 Like
