Android Audio bites

Today I thought it would be fun to throw together a Drumkit Soundboard. I was at work the other day and it occurred to me that doing something like this would be really simple and result in something that would be relatively cool.

I've got a program on my desktop named Guitar Pro which is really cool for learning and playing along with songs. It employs something that the company terms "Realistic Sound Engine". What this boils down to is real-world samples of instruments that can be played back at real-time. (OBSERVATION: The Guitar Pro site shows an iPad and iPod, but curiously no Android device... The reasons will become apparent below.)

I took that and created a drum track with the simple drum samples I wanted: snare, bass, high hat, and cymbal. I exported the result and pulled it into open source audio editor Audacity. From there, created individual samples and stored them off as OGG files. I fired up Eclipse and created a libgdx based project called DrumkitSoundboard. After looking up some API calls and creating a really uber-simple quadrant based UI (each quadrant of the screen corresponding to one sound sample), I had the rudiments of my soundboard going. This is where the problem cropped up.

The problem -- the audio on my HTC Incredible lagged to the point of unusability. There is something on the order of 100ms+ gap between the time the user hits the screen to the point that the sample hits the speaker. If you are trying to maintain any kind of rhythm, you are going to be severely messed up trying to play it... I know I was.

As a result, I posted a query on the Bad Logic Games forum about this to see if anyone has run into a similar issue. It turns out that audio latency has been identified as a problem since as early as 2009. The issue is logged here. There are several music app developers that would *love* to port their stuff from the iPhone/iPod to Android, but can't because of this problem with high-latency of real-time sound. Ugh! That royally sucks. ...and also probably explains why there's no Android app from the guys at Guitar Pro.

For fun, I cracked open the Android Market and downloaded a drum kit soundboard I found there (Hit it!). Turns out it has the same lag issue I experienced. Nice.

Needless to say, this put the kibosh on my own drum kit idea. At best, I could create an audio composer of sorts... Where instead of making things interactive, you could create a drum track. For fun, I did this programmatically to see what the result was. With a target tempo of 120 bpm, playing drum samples at an eighth note beat (bass+hihat, hihat, snare+hihat, hihat, repeat ad infinitum) it worked... Mostly. There were times where you could tell it got off the beat by a perceptible amount. Another: Ugh!

I dunno, I think I'd be ultimately disappointed in the result. Still, it would be kinda fun to allow people to compose simple drum lines. Imagine doing that and then hooking up your Android phone to your car stereo... I've already got the name of the app in mind: MasterBeater. :)