Android 12/Android Auto Artwork

[tedfroop]

Phone: Pixel 4a

OS: Android 12 Kernel 4.14.234  Build SP1A.211105.002

In android auto only. 

Added Christmas music (All FLAC with artwork embedded in tags.) 

Music scanned ok, songs added to library.  Made a playlist. 

Now when I play it in the car it randomly shows the wrong artwork on Android auto head unit only.

Phone shows correct artwork for all songs.

 

[andrewilley]

I get this problem intermittently in Android Auto too. Most tracks display their correct artwork on both the phone screen and the AA headunit, but maybe one in twenty tracks will get some completely random cover art from a track not even in the current playlist shown on the HU. The cover art shown in Poweramp on the phone is always correct, it's only the HU screen that shows the random image - and the incorrect image stays linked to that track if you skip forward and backward again. Very strange!

Andre

[maxmp]

@andrewilley if possible, if this issue occurs again, can you try to generate Full report from Android Developer options and send it to me?

Also, if the image is always invalid for some specific track, can you check if this is embedded image or downloaded/manually selected? Thanks!

[andrewilley]

I was planning on doing some more testing tomorrow; I will try to get a video of both screens changing track side-by-side, and an Android log of same. There does seem to be one particular playlist that often causes it, and the mismatched images often seem to come from assorted songs from one particular folder, so hopefully I can recreate it. All images (the correct ones and the mismatches) are embedded into their respective audio files. 

Andre

[andrewilley]

Error log emailed, along with a video of the bug occurring.

Andre

[maxmp]

Thanks for the logs/video. My investigation shows that Android Auto may cache wrong album art and reuse it for some tracks. When Auto does this, it doesn't even request any album art from Poweramp, so Poweramp can't do anything about that to refresh that image.

I was able to fix this by doing "Clear cache" in Android Auto app settings (in phone settings). Not sure why invalid album art got there, I guess it may be the album art from the previous "iteration" of the Poweramp db. Poweramp may reuse ID for track (e.g. after Full Rescan or new songs added), so if Auto caches it, it may in turn reuse some old album art.

I will try to implement some serial numbering or something that will prevent Auto from reusing old album arts.

[Disturbd1]

@maxmp would this solution apply for devices on Android 11 still? I've had the issue with wrong artwork displaying on my car's screen for over a year.

[maxmp]

@Disturbd1 next Poweramp version will include workaround for this issue. As for the currently available builds, cleaning Auto cache helps (there are no any other visible side effects).

[andrewilley]

Thanks Max. I'm not going to clear my AA data/cache in the meantime so I can properly test the workaround. I now know a number of specific tracks which are affected by this issue (it's consistent and repeatable for whatever tracks have been affected) so I can check them again after installing the next PA release.

Andre

[maxmp]

@andrewilley this is not about Poweramp cache, it’s about Auto app cache.

[andrewilley]

3 hours ago, maxmp said:

@andrewilley this is not about Poweramp cache, it’s about Auto app cache.

Yes, that's what I said. I'm not going to clear the Android Auto cache.

Andre

[andrewilley]

I can confirm this is now working fine for me on PA build 919 for all the tracks that were causing the issue before. I didn't clear my Android Auto cache in the meantime, so this should be fine for all users now.

@Disturbd1 and @tedfroop could you check with PA build 919 and confirm? Thanks. 

Andre

[Disturbd1]

@andrewilley I just had to post a bug report for 919 crashing at launch, but prior to the update I had done as @maxmp suggested and cleared AA cache. That seemed to properly rebuild the album art cache and display correctly in AA thereafter.