Auto Start / Resume

[DoctorWizard]

So I recently bought one of those android-based head units for my truck.  Amazon has quite a few of them from various manufacturers, I purchased one of the ATOTO models.  They all feature "fast 2 second boot".  It's very cool and I really like it!

The stock music player that comes with it is pretty lame, and I like Poweramp and would like to use it.  I cannot find a way to get Poweramp to automatically resume playing when it powers up.  From the ATOTO forums and observation, it seems that when the ignition is shut off, the player takes note of which apps are running, closes them, and then goes into deep sleep mode.  When the ignition is powered on again, it relaunches whatever apps were previously running.  It does NOT appear to leave Poweramp or any other apps running when it goes to sleep, it kills them first.

So I would like to see an option for Poweramp to resume playing upon launch where it left off when it was shut down.  I turned on the settings for 'Wakelock', 'Keep Service' and 'Resume' under Headset -> Audio Focus but none of those did the trick.  If there is already a way to do this, could someone clue me in?

 

[andrewilley]

The "Resume on Start" feature in Settings > Headset/Bluetooth > Audio Focus is the one you want, and if you test by exiting the app and restarting it then that should start playing on startup. There must be something odd about the way your device is restarting its apps on powerup. Has PA remember the last song position by the way (if you press Play manually after restarting the car).

Andre

[DoctorWizard]

Thank you for the very quick reply!

All my music is on an SD card inserted in the player (It is NOT coming from a phone via bluetooth, or an aux cable, or via USB with Android Auto, or streaming).  It is all organized into playlists.  It usually remembers which playlist and song it was playing when it was shut down, although not always.  Occasionally it is on some other seemingly random playlist* or just all songs in alphabetical order.

Don't feel bad, I've tinkered with 6 or 7 different media players so far, and so far none of them get it right.  I like yours the best tho, and yours is the only one that even manages to remember what playlist it was on most of the time.

*1 Since my music is organized into playlists, and that's the only way I like to play it, I organized it on the SD card such that the normal 'Music' folder contains only playlists, and all the MP3 files are in a sister folder named 'Songs' and the playlists refer to the files with a relative path.  The logic behind this was that (hopefully) the media player would not try to index everything by Artist/Album/Genre/Name and just focus on the lists.  This trips up most other media players and they won't even acknowledge any of my collection even after manually configuring library folders.  Again, your player handles this better than most!  I suppose this might be the reason your app is misbehaving and I am planning to switch it all to a "normal" file/folder structure with everything under 'Music'.

*2 It seems to have a fondness for the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra!  I have several playlists of Symphonic Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Phil Collins, and when it mis-remembers, it is often on one of them.  At least your app has refined tastes! ?

...

I am also a developer, (although mainly Windows desktop apps and server backend stuff, not Android), and I will be happy to run any tests or debug scripts for you and report the results.  I suspect these Android car head units will become more popular and they are all featuring the 2 second boot, so if we can get this working, you will have an advantage over the other players.

[andrewilley]

You could try creating a Tasker (or similar) task which runs a few seconds after device startup to send a MEDIA_PLAY command (or issue a command to Poweramp's API).

Andre