Fixed my HTC Music tab stuttering issue
 

I posted this in the Custom ROM thread I'm using, but thought it may help others. Hopefully the cross-post is forgivable. Ever since I got the Imagio, I've had constant issues with the HTC Music tab, primarily stuttering every few seconds during playback. WMP has always worked fine.

I did two things today, not sure which one did the trick, but I'm starting to think is was the second one, now that I really think about this:

1) I reformatted the microSD card with 4K blocks and re-synced everything. Block size shouldn't matter for files this size, so I don't know why this would have helped if it was indeed the reason.

2) I removed any tracks with special characters in the artist/title names. In my case I had tracks from "Blue Oyster Cult" and "Motley Crue", with the umlauts in the 'proper' locations. I have a Roku Soundbridge that doesn't like those tracks either, so I thought it was worth a try.

Anyway, I've been hammering this thing playing music all afternoon and only ran into a single instance where playback stopped/stuttered. It could just be a bum MP3 (sync issues do happen!). I have my full playlist on the device and it's really working quite well. AudioManager_eng.exe isn't spiking and staying at a nice steady 2-5% CPU. [Note: I am using a custom 6.5.x/SenseUI 2.5 ROM, but I had these problems with the stock VZW ROM as well]

If anyone else is having the stuttering/stopping problem every couple seconds on their device as well, I recommend trying the 2 things I did if you haven't already.

I will put the special character tracks back on the device before I next flash it to see if it causes the HTC Music tab to choke. I'm understandably leery to do that right now since it's actually working right for the first time :headbang:

Re: Fixed my HTC Music tab stuttering issue
 

I have issues with some roms and custom locks, I changed the settings to not lock while music is playing and I have no skipping when I have the lock off. I think it has something to do with the lock.

Re: Fixed my HTC Music tab stuttering issue
 

Yeah, even the default WM lock screen does cause a stop in playback in HTC Music the first time you use it, but the problem I have had (even with the stock VZW ROM) was a constant stop/start of playback every few seconds on all MP3 files. Looking in a task manager, you will see AudioManager_eng.exe spike the CPU at those times, it was having a hard time with something in my case.

I don't think HTC sets the process priority for AudioManager_eng.exe high enough, which is what I think causes the problem with lock screens and such. Maybe on something like the HD2 it's not such a problem?

Re: Fixed my HTC Music tab stuttering issue
 

Just an update on this, I did re-add the files from my playlist with special characters in them before I re-flashed to a newer custom ROM this evening.

At first, I didn't experience any issues other than an increase in the time it took the Music Tab to do it's little spinning circle thing after the files were added. Playback still seemed fine. However, I then deleted the HTC Audio Manager database file and let it rebuld from scratch. It took a very long time again, and after playing 5 or 6 tracks I started having issues again. AudioManager_eng.exe was spiking the CPU every few seconds and playback would stop and start like it was before.

I used WMP and the playlist to remove those files again before I re-flashed (I did not just delete them from the SD card). I changed nothing on the SD card manually. After flashing, the Music Tab did the spinning circle thing for a very brief amount of time, and all is well!

So ... in my personal case ... the files I had in my sync list with special characters in the title/artist do appear to have been my issue all along. I did skip a step, I should have verified that removing the files and deleting the database re-solved the issue before I flashed, I apologize for not doing that.

Hopefully this information will help somebody else at some point! I'm a pretty happy camper myself, I don't even like Motley Crue all that much. No major loss - LOL !

Re: Fixed my HTC Music tab stuttering issue
 

Where is this setting?