Sound glitching after auto profile switching

[smalg]

Hi, currently using the trial version of Poweramp EQ.

It generally works very well for me, except for a specific bug: when auto profile switching occurs, for example when plugging a USB DAC, quite often sound gets distorted (several cuts per second, low treble, as if something was wrong DSP-wise).

The only workaround I've found is to disable the "Enable Audio Processing" toggle and enabling it again. Works 100% of the time.

For reference, I'm using the parametric EQ in cascade mode, compression off, limiter off, balance off, advanced player tracking ON, and every known player is configured with Keep Equalizer Session ON and Fade off. The DSP seems to be running at 192kHz according to Poweramp EQ.

Something else that might be of interest: I actually have no profile assigned to this USB DAC. However, when I assign a profile to my phone's speaker and "Other Output Devices" (it's an empty profile with no EQ bands at all), then as soon as I plug in my USB DAC, Poweramp EQ seems to restore the last profile I used with it, despite no assigned profile for this specific output device.

My phone is a Samsung Galaxy A13 5G running Android 13.

To date this is the only issue preventing me to get the paid version. Any help welcome! Thanks in advance 🙂

[smalg]

FWIW I found a "workaround": disabling "Keep Equalizer Session" seems to eliminate the issue altogether. So the origin of the problem might be the "Keep Equalizer Session" feature itself.

[maxmp]

@smalg thanks for the info, but this is player dependent option which may be required for some players.

[smalg]

@maxmp The app states that this option is "for players which close equalization session on pause, causing audio artifacts on resume" which happens with almost every application on my phone. Enabling it works as intended (at least according to my understanding of this feature) and eliminates the very short duration during which equalization isn't active right after starting playback again, which I suppose is the "audio artifact" mentioned by the app.

But the issue I'm talking about is a different thing: sometimes when playback is restarted, the sound becomes continuously distorted, and this doesn't stop until disabling audio processing entirely in Poweramp EQ.

Surely this isn't intended behavior?

[maxmp]

@smalg spotify, youtube music, and event latest apple music do not change session id (though not for all possible options) - this is the correct approach to that.

(Btw max number of sessions is a limited (while quite large) number. Sessions can reach the limit and phone just completely freezes then.)

The artifact on start of playback happens as some players send session id with a delay. The unequalized part of music is that delay you can hear. Also there is always some minor implicit messaging delay (within tens of ms, if messaging is done right and only for the first song played in the player, if session id is not changed).

The 3rd party equalization support in players is very simple on Android - 2 lines of code. The devs don't do it properly mostly due to the lack of initiative and testing - users don't request it, or devs/management ignore/backlog user requests.

[smalg]

@maxmp Thank you for the detailed explanation! However I feel like we still don't understand each other: the problem I'm talking about is something else. Hopefully this will clear things up (enable subtitles for more information):