Reduced color depth in album art display

[marcel-100]

Hey folks,

the album art shows some weird artifacts, apparently due to color depth reduction. I've created a colorful test file to illustrate the issue. The album art is a 8 bits per channel RGB PNG file without any compression whatsoever embedded into a FLAC file. Note that viewing the PNG file on its own in the phone's default image viewing app does not show any artifacts. The same goes for playing the audio file in VLC.

In Phonograph

What the album art is supposed to look like

Devices are Lenovo K10a40 and Lenovo Tab10
bot with Android 6.0 and Phonograph 1.1.2 Pro and free

[marcel-100]

Disabling "Ignore Media Store Cover" doesn't really affect the issue. If anything, it makes matters worse by slightly blurring the image.

[arkon]

Memory constraints are typically the concern here since the "better" decoding algorithms use more memory and most Android phones don't have a lot of memory.

[marcel-100]

The original PNG is 720 by 720 pixels, that is 720^2 * 3 bytes which totals at about 1.6 MB (V)RAM usage if fully decompressed.

I've created a second test file with significantly smaller dimensions. It's 256 by 256, requiring only about 0.2 MBs. The result is the same unfortunately.

I would like to add that both figures are negligible in comparison to something like 1 GB of RAM available even on low-end devices.

This StackOverflow question might be relevant: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21050649/color-depth-in-android#21051007

[arkon]

I suppose we could try to prefer ARGB_8888.

Worth keeping in mind that there's a per-app limit on memory too, which differs by device, and that the app needs to buffer the actual music and such in memory.

[marcel-100]

I didn't know that Android has such strict policies concerning memory usage. I rather expected some kind of swapping to occur if RAM gets low.

Nonetheless I would very much appreciate if you guys gave ARGB_8888 a try in some upcoming release :)

[marcel-100]

1.2.0 is out, but album art sadly remains low quality. The guys from Vinyl don't have this issue though.

[arkon]

We'll probably need to update Glide.