Posts Tagged ‘ndk’

Android Audio: Play an MP3 file on an AudioTrack

Friday, September 17th, 2010

In my previous article I outlined the stages you need to go through if you want to manually decode WAVs to PCM to play them on an AudioTrack. I promised to show how to do the same for MP3s and this is what this post is going to be about.

Again, the use case is more common than you might think. The only way you can play an MP3 file via direct Android API is MediaPlayer which is heavyweight, slow and presents only high-level API. If you need to mix or modify audio streams or manage them with low latency, you are on your own. But I will try to help you right now.

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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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