SqueezePlayer

Since February I’ve been working on this project, spending my nights to make my phone even more versatile.

Now SqueezePlayer is ready to be released in it’s very first version, and I’m excited to finally go life with my very first App on the Android market.

I did have some experience with SqueezeBox playback because I did the same for my iPad-App ‘SqueezePad‘.
I had hoped I could reuse a lot of what I had written already: but in the end it turned out that SqueezePlayer needed to be a full rewrite.

So how comes?

Well: first coding for Android is done in a completely different programming language.
But even more important: Androids sound system works totally different to that of iOS devices.
Unfortunately ‘different’ here means: it’s absolutely down to the minimum one could expect from a sound library.

In the shiny (well from a programmers perspective) iOS world you just say: “Hi sound library – this is my mp3 or AAC stream: go on and just play it!”
On Android I head to learn: the sound library says: “Well – if you want to stream something – please convert everything to 16bit stereo WAV first, I don’t care for your compressed music”.
Which means along with the not too easy Squeezebox networking stuff  now one has to dig into decoding mp3 streams, arrghhh …

After finishing my first version, which streamed nice on HTC Desire I send it to my first Beta tester (HTC Legend) who then said: “doesn’t work, my phone gets dead slow”. Bummer … my Desire has a 1Ghz CPU, the legend ‘just’ 528Mhz. So back to programming, not only implementing an mp3 decoder, but a FAST mp3 decoder …

To make a long long story short: it was an interesting ride indeed, I learned a lot and if I had known before – the SqueezePlayer project maybe never would have been started 😀

But here we are … so enjoy like I do now!