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lockscreen widget doesn't appear if phone locks while paused


nstyn4te

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at the moment, if the user puts the player on pause (except from the lockscreen widget when the phone is already locked) and the phone gets locked, when the user returns to the lockscreen the lockscreen widget does not appear. If the user just wants to play music he has to unlock the phone first. Is it possible to have the lockscreen widget appear even if the player is paused, maybe as a setting? With this fix, the user can start or resume playback from the lockscreen at any time.

thanks for reading.

Thanks for the request.

Yes, this is done intentionally. It's possible to make it always appear, optionally of course.

Still, this won't always work, as if Android shuts down the PowerAMP process, PowerAMP, of course, can't detect the screen is on and show anything until started by user. So this will work fine on mid-to-high end phones, and not so great on lower end phones (or if you use automated task killer).

well, obviously it won't appear if the process isn't actually on. Not much to do about that (aside from a "start on boot" option).

As for task killers though, Poweramp seems to be a pretty stubborn process, always reappearing in the process list a few seconds after i kill it with process manager. If it's the case that it's effectively always on after you start it (which does seem to be the case), then the only time it won't work is right after the phone reboots (a pretty infrequent occurrence i imagine) or maybe if the phone locks during the few seconds when the auto task killer has the process down (if you have one and don't have the app on the ignore list).

tl;dr, i figure that such an option should be useful close to all of the time.

PowerAMP process started by Android automatically for events like mounted SD card. This always happens after phone boot (card is mounted and it's not known if it was updated or not, so both system media scanner and PowerAMP scanner are started by OS).

Other then this 1-5 sec scanning, there is nothing for PowerAMP todo in the background (when music is paused).

Killing the process mean crashing it in unexpected moment - this causes db corruption. Also, Android thinks process crashed because of bug in it and restarts it.

Android OS will shutdown the PowerAMP properly at the moment it needs more memory (though, it will start that killing from the processes which took more memory).

There is no difference in battery life or cpu utilization if memory is filled with PowerAMP process or not. It makes difference though if you want to play something and PowerAMP was killed previously - process will start over, libraries will load again, a lot of initialization code will be ran by Android. This will consume battery/cpu, obviously.

Task killer may be useful on older Android revisions (1.5/1.6), but PowerAMP doesn't run on these. Task killer may be useful for apps which do something in the background. PowerAMP has nothing to do in background when it's paused, so it does nothing (sleeps).

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