3 ms·

Please can someone invent a bluetooth audio profile which allows buffering a long time in advance? Ie. if I'm playing a 1 minute song, the whole song should ge

Please can someone invent a bluetooth audio profile which allows buffering a long time in advance? Ie. if I'm playing a 1 minute song, the whole song should get buffered up. Obviously, if I click 'pause' or change the volume, the buffer should be discarded. But the long buffer should let my phone sleep more of the time (saving power), and survive poor radio connectivity.

solraph 3y ago
Unlikely to happen. I sincerely doubt most headphones would have the memory for that buffer. Sure, it's only a megabyte or two of ram, but your headphones would have to spend valuable battery on keeping that ram active. From my foray into audio app (quite a while ago, I admit), I imagine application support would be tricky as well.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Yeah, memory on these devices tends to be pretty tight. The other challenge with buffering ahead so much is that if you do skip, you’ve basically used your energy budget for 0 value. You’d have to make the argument that there’s net savings, but that would only materialize with predictions that are right enough that the savings outweigh the times you lose (e.g. a simplest heuristic would be if the audio stream has been live for 5 seconds without skipping, send the available buffer at faster than realtime).
  - spockz 3y ago
    IIRC, Spotify applies a similar strategy also for deciding which music to already fetch from the servers when listening to a playlist to minimise the gap between pressing next song and actual playback. It seems like it should be exactly the same algorithm for sending it to the headset, with the exception of other sounds like notifications/calls.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Well they can advertise how much memory they have... RAM uses less power than keeping a radio alive, so I suspect aggressive buffering is a net energy saver.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Reminds me of the old portable CD players that would advertise the capacity of their anti-skip buffers.
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      Sony Bluetooth headphones, now with 10 seconds g-shock protection!
    - brewtide 3y ago
      I remember owning one of the first portable CD players that did not have any anti-skip buffer, at all. It was a very delicate experience.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  There are inexpensive headphones with the entire MP3 player built in, so I doubt a little RAM would make much difference.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 3y ago
You'd love that until the phone rings and you want to pre-empt all that buffered stuff with your incoming call rather than to first listen to the next minute of Led Zeppelin.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Well the protocol would need support for "something happened, drop the buffer". PulseAudio calls it "rewinding" for example: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/Developer/Rewinding/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documen...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Right, true, or some kind of priority queue.
- lstamour 3y ago
  You could use BLE to signal the incoming call or switching tracks or queuing up a new track. Likewise I’d love it if re-encoding the AAC from the player weren’t a necessary step when there isn’t additional audio. But then I suppose they would have to mix the audio on headphones which … actually sounds doable given that’s basically what noise cancelling and transparency mode requires already. Of course, the cynic in me wonders why we can’t do AirPlay 2-style functionality with simple Bluetooth and BLE speakers, but Apple wants to preserve their margin and ecosystem. Literally lossless headphone audio was mostly a thing with cords, and we’re still playing catchup to the idea. I do remember a brief period a period in the late 00’s when “MP3 headphones” were a thing, and you could add an SD card to your headphones and listen wirelessly. I’m not sure any of those supported FLAC though. My suspicion is that in the future, we will skip Bluetooth and go straight to wifi and cellular, where these tiny AirPods end up connecting to audio sources directly and basically only use BLE to sync between themselves. That way you can “leave the phone at home,” etc. They would probably have built-in storage too, for offline support.
jwtorres 3y ago
Well that's doable with enough embedded memory, but it will become an issue when you want to sync audio and video. So it really is less of a protocol thing and more of something that an individual product could design in, allowing a user to toggle the feature via an app.
izacus 3y ago
That is pretty much explicitly against what most users want from audio unfortunately.

solraph 3y ago

Unlikely to happen. I sincerely doubt most headphones would have the memory for that buffer. Sure, it's only a megabyte or two of ram, but your headphones would have to spend valuable battery on keeping that ram active. From my foray into audio app (quite a while ago, I admit), I imagine application support would be tricky as well.

vlovich123 3y ago
Yeah, memory on these devices tends to be pretty tight. The other challenge with buffering ahead so much is that if you do skip, you’ve basically used your energy budget for 0 value. You’d have to make the argument that there’s net savings, but that would only materialize with predictions that are right enough that the savings outweigh the times you lose (e.g. a simplest heuristic would be if the audio stream has been live for 5 seconds without skipping, send the available buffer at faster than realtime).
- spockz 3y ago
  IIRC, Spotify applies a similar strategy also for deciding which music to already fetch from the servers when listening to a playlist to minimise the gap between pressing next song and actual playback. It seems like it should be exactly the same algorithm for sending it to the headset, with the exception of other sounds like notifications/calls.
londons_explore 3y ago
Well they can advertise how much memory they have... RAM uses less power than keeping a radio alive, so I suspect aggressive buffering is a net energy saver.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Reminds me of the old portable CD players that would advertise the capacity of their anti-skip buffers.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Sony Bluetooth headphones, now with 10 seconds g-shock protection!
  - brewtide 3y ago
    I remember owning one of the first portable CD players that did not have any anti-skip buffer, at all. It was a very delicate experience.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
RobotToaster 3y ago
There are inexpensive headphones with the entire MP3 player built in, so I doubt a little RAM would make much difference.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 3y ago

You'd love that until the phone rings and you want to pre-empt all that buffered stuff with your incoming call rather than to first listen to the next minute of Led Zeppelin.

londons_explore 3y ago
Well the protocol would need support for "something happened, drop the buffer". PulseAudio calls it "rewinding" for example: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/Developer/Rewinding/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documen...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Right, true, or some kind of priority queue.
lstamour 3y ago
You could use BLE to signal the incoming call or switching tracks or queuing up a new track. Likewise I’d love it if re-encoding the AAC from the player weren’t a necessary step when there isn’t additional audio. But then I suppose they would have to mix the audio on headphones which … actually sounds doable given that’s basically what noise cancelling and transparency mode requires already. Of course, the cynic in me wonders why we can’t do AirPlay 2-style functionality with simple Bluetooth and BLE speakers, but Apple wants to preserve their margin and ecosystem. Literally lossless headphone audio was mostly a thing with cords, and we’re still playing catchup to the idea. I do remember a brief period a period in the late 00’s when “MP3 headphones” were a thing, and you could add an SD card to your headphones and listen wirelessly. I’m not sure any of those supported FLAC though. My suspicion is that in the future, we will skip Bluetooth and go straight to wifi and cellular, where these tiny AirPods end up connecting to audio sources directly and basically only use BLE to sync between themselves. That way you can “leave the phone at home,” etc. They would probably have built-in storage too, for offline support.

jwtorres 3y ago

Well that's doable with enough embedded memory, but it will become an issue when you want to sync audio and video. So it really is less of a protocol thing and more of something that an individual product could design in, allowing a user to toggle the feature via an app.

izacus 3y ago

That is pretty much explicitly against what most users want from audio unfortunately.