App stutters for artists with hundreds of albums

Danny,

I am a full in, paid customer, 100% invested in Roon. I love everything it does, but am having a problem with one thing. Roon’s support in QA of its Android app bugs. Android has 86% of the global market share. I state this fact because it should support the case for better Android support with Roon.

There are two specific issues myself and others have found with the Roon Android tablet app. This problem only manifests itself with Android tablets. Your Android phone app works fine. The first issue is with scrolling when there are a large number of albums for an artist. Your Android tablet app will freeze and after about 1 minute free up to stutter scroll very slowly. The second issue, which is largely cosmetic, is that the screen tears at the edges with the Android tablet app. Again, this is does not occur with the phone app.

What makes things difficult to navigate with the phone app when there are a large number of albums is that you have to constantly swipe through. There is no slider bar to scroll through the albums like there is with the tablet app. Because of these issues it is very difficult to effectively listen to music of an artist in which I have a large number of albums. Is there any chance you can look into these issues?

Thanks,
John

what tablet are you using?

Danny,

I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 and a Galaxy Note 10.1 2014. The behavior is identical on both. I bought the S3 just for Roon browsing thinking the Note 10.1 was the issue, but that was not the case.

Thanks

dragging in @support… the stutter seems wrong… but maybe it is a known issue if your artist is truely that big.

As for the navigation, we are moving away from the page by page browsers in the next major ui release. No schedule, but work is already underway.

Why is the behavior is different, and not a problem on the Samsung Android phone, but it is on the Samsung Android tablet?

totally different UI on phone vs tablet… our next big ui release will unify the phone + tablet.

Ok, it’s UI related then. Is it related to album art or anything that could be disabled to allow for fast, unhindered browsing of albums?

try allowing more ram for your textures… settings -> setup

Tried that. I set it to max and no difference. Can album art be disabled per artist? I wouldn’t want to disable it for all.
Since the Android phone can handle it, is the memory handled differently between the tablet UI from phone UI?

can you show us some screenshots of the two devices? I’m trying to get a feel for what is stuttering…

Sure, I’ll do that at home tonight. It should show the screen tearing, but I don’t think it can show the delayed scroll, or stuttering issue. To be more clear, after I select the artist I am not able to scroll down through the albums for about 30-60 seconds. When the screen does move it takes another 30 seconds every time I slide through the screen to scroll through albums. If I select an album it takes 30-60 seconds to load the album’s song contents. When I play a song it only takes a few seconds.

what artist? how many albums? is this the only screen that goes nuts?

The artist is the Grateful Dead. Not sure how familiar you are with them, but they’ve recorded nearly every concert they’ve performed. Each one of those concerts would be considered an album in Roon. I have about 1500 albums. There are a couple other artists like Phish and Widespread Panic who also allow recording of their concerts in which I have a couple hundred albums. Those also create a delay/stutter but not as severe as with the Dead. The number of albums appears to have an impact.

I will take a video of the behavior over the weekend and share it with you.

See this previous thread for more info.

Yes @Rugby that was my post. I still have the problem and no one replied to my last 3 posts of that thread. You asked support to chime in but they never did. One of the patches changed the load time from 5 minutes to about a minute or less, so there was an improvement, but it is still a problem. It takes that long anytime I want to browse through the album list.

@danny, I have a couple videos to share. One of the screen edge tearing and the other of the long delay in response from Roon while scrolling through albums. If you provide an email address I can put it on Dropbox, or I can post them to YouTube. Let me know which you prefer.

Thanks

youtube + link here…

Here you go. Both videos were in the dark which should give a good look at the screen. Sorry for the focus. I can redo it with the lights on as well. With the music playing it helps to understand the time delay. Also note the behavior of the track progression in the bar at the bottom. It stops. Everything hangs while Roon tries to process the scroll request.

Screen tear problem:
https://youtu.be/d9UP5Bdt1po

Scrolling problem:
https://youtu.be/5pnJs_OzUKc

Did you get a chance to watch the videos? Let me know if you need me to make one with the lights on.

Hey @Johnseye – Danny and I discussed this, and I just wanted to acknowledge that we are aware of this issue.

As it stands now, the Artist page simply isn’t built to handle this many albums:

We have been working on a UI redesign, and I’ve noted this case in our internal tracker so we can give this some thought as things come together. No time frame I can offer on this for the moment.

For now, we’re going to look into whether there’s a workaround we can do on that page short of redesigning the whole thing. I’ve put a ticket into our tracker on that as well, but in the meantime you may want to use Focus to look at albums with the Dead as a performer, and then bookmark it – at least then you’ll at least be able to browse all those shows.

Working on it @Johnseye – thanks for your patience here. :metal: