Simple Protocol Player

Links:

Play store

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaytat.simpleprotocolplayer&hl=en

Server source

https://github.com/kaytat/SimpleProtocolServer

More info

http://kaytat.com/blog/

Details

This media player plays uncompressed PCM data from a server over your local network. This is meant to be used for streaming audio from a PC to your Android phone or tablet. The focus has been latency and so all the options are intended for the user to be able to find a compromise between latency and quality.

As a rule of thumb, a low sample rate + mono + 50 ms or less of buffer time are the settings that are generally used.

This project is based on an old version of this Android example: https://github.com/googlesamples/android-MediaBrowserService

Changes for 0.5.9.22 (version 22)

Revert all changes after 0.5.9.0 (version 15). Then update minSdk to 26 and target and compile SDK to 36. Since this forces edge-to-edge support on the latest Android versions, hack the app a bit so that it doesn't look terrible.

Also create a release branch dedicated for just Play Store updates.

Changes for 0.5.7.0 (version 13)

• Allow PERFORMANCE_MODE_LOW_LATENCY for Android O and above
• Allow use of minimal buffer size as reported by AudioTrack.
  • The idea here is to allow Android to dictate the buffer size and so the user don't have to tweak the ms delay setting.

Streaming from Ubuntu (or anything running PulseAudio)

The following web page describes how to configure PulseAudio for use with this player. http://kaytat.com/blog/?page_id=301

Streaming with Pipewire

• On demand with enabled pipewire-pulse using pactl from pulseaudio-utils: pactl load-module module-simple-protocol-tcp rate=44100 format=s16le channels=2 record=true port=4711

• Permanently through config file /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/simple-protocol.conf:

context.modules = [
{   name = libpipewire-module-protocol-simple
    args = {
        capture = true
        audio.rate = 44100
        audio.format = S16LE
        audio.channels = 2
        audio.position = [ FL FR ]
        server.address = [
            "tcp:4711"
        ]
    }
}
]

(https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_protocol_simple.html for reference)

Streaming from Windows

Download the server from the github link above and run it locally. The server has some options also to help tune the performance.

Test your latency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWh9YLtbbws