Posts Tagged ‘beginner’

Android Audio: Play a WAV file on an AudioTrack

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

If you’ve managed to hack around the various issues that AudioTrack has, then you are probably enjoying its benefits, such as low latency (in the STATIC mode), ability to generate audio on the fly (in the STREAM mode) and the wonderful ability to access and modify raw sound data before you play it.

However, the problem now is getting that data from a source. Many applications that need to use AudioTrack do not generate PCM audio from scratch (an example of an app that does that would be Ethereal Dialpad and other similar apps). You will probably encounter the need to load and use existing audio samples from file sources such as WAV or MP3 files.

Don’t expect to be able to use MediaPlayer facilities to decode raw audio from WAVs and MP3s. Although MediaPlayer can play those files pretty well, its logic is almost entirely contained in the native layer and there is no option for us to plug in and use the decoders for our own purposes. Thus, we have to decode PCM from audio files manually.

In this article I will cover WAV files and in the next one we will get advanced and read audio from MP3s.

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Android Tricks: Multitouch AND 1.5 Support, Same App

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

I don’t know about you but I have an emotional attachment to old platforms and APIs. They are often sweet and nice in their primordial simplicity, even with their well-understood limitations. Even when they become obsolete, we developers still remember and miss them.

In case of Android, version 1.5 / API level 3 is technically obsolete but is far from being extinct from the device market. In fact, as of the day I write this article, it is one of the most widely installed Android versions on the market. (And if you add the not-so-different 1.6, they take almost half of the market together.) While subsequent versions brought us a lot of goodies in various areas of the platform API, 80% or more of all functionality our apps need today is present in 1.5.

Sure, there are cases when your app just isn’t meant to run on 1.x. For example, its core functionality is based on the APIs that are absent from API level 3 (e.g. you’re making a live wallpaper), or when you don’t want to support old devices for performance reasons, or due to a marketing decision. However, in many cases what makes developers raise the minSdkVersion bar is the need to use some of the 1.6+ APIs, such as the new contact management facilities, signal strength detection or better animation support.

The good news I’m trying to bring in this article – to those who aren’t yet familiar with this trick – is that you can actually use the new API yet keep minSdkVersion at 3. This trick might not work in all cases, and might look like a hack, but it will work for many situations like this – and who knows, might allow your app to reach out to its grateful, ready-to-pay customers who still use 1.5.

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Android Beginners: NDK Setup Step by Step

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Most Android developers start their learning from pure Java, Android SDK based apps. While everyone is aware that there is the NDK (the Native Development Kit), they don’t face the need to use it. Since NDK is distributed separately from the SDK, including documentations and samples, you are not likely to get familiar with NDK before you actually try it as a solution to one of your development challenges.

Because of that, many people think of NDK as of “black magic” of Android development. Many developers who are not familiar with NDK think it is 1) complex to understand and use, and at the same time a lot of developers will think it is a sort of a 2) silver bullet that can solve any problem that can’t be solved with SDK.

Well, both opinions are rather wrong, as I hope to show further in this post. Although it does have a maintenance cost and does add technical complexity to your project, NDK is not difficult to install or use in your project. And, while there are cases where NDK will be really helpful for your app, NDK has a rather limited API that’s mostly focused on several performance-critical areas, such as:

  • OpenGL, including support for some newer versions that the (Java) SDK supports
  • Math (some, but not all, calculation-intensive algorithms might benefit from being done on the native layer)
  • 2D graphics – pixelbuffer support (only starting with 2.2)
  • libc – it’s there for compatibility and perhaps to allow you to port existing native code

In this tutorial we will take our basic Android development environment that we created in one of the previous articles and add NDK support to it. We will also create a basic skeleton project that uses NDK that you can use as the foundation for your NDK-powered apps.

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Android Beginners: From Bare Windows to Your First App

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Want to develop Android apps but don’t know where to start?

Follow these steps and we will build a complete Android development environment from scratch, starting on a fresh Windows installation. The whole process should not take more than 20-30 minutes, provided that you have a good internet connection.

I need to mention that we will not develop a full-blown app here. The focus is on setting up the environment so we will develop the simplest app possible.

Here’s what we start with: a nice fresh XP installation. I intentionally left everything intact, including the ugly wallpaper and Internet Explorer. (Note: all screenshots are clickable.)

Here’s the basic stack of requirements for Android app development:

  1. Java (JDK)
  2. Eclipse IDE
  3. Android SDK
  4. ADT (Android plug-in for Eclipse)

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