Episode 85: Focus on Audio

Romain, Jean-Michel, and Tor.
Chet is in the distant background (~2,500 miles west of the studio.)

In this episode, Romain and Tor talk with Jean-Michel Trivi from the Android audio team. Tune in to learn about hardware speaker design, ducking and attenuation, stream types, audio tagging, audio focus, and more!

Links:

• If your activity is playing any audio, don't forget to declare what stream type the hardware volume keys should control with Activity.setVolumeControlStream(int stream)
  https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/volume-and-earphones.html
• Since Android L, use AudioAttributes to describe your use case and content for your audio playback:
  https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/AudioAttributes.html
• Use AudioAttributes.getVolumeControlStream() to derive the stream type for volume control in your Activity
  https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/AudioAttributes.html#getVolumeControlStream()
• A summary of what audio focus is, when and how to request and abandon audio focus, and code snippet for your focus listener:
  https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/audio-focus.html
• And finally, when Jean-Michel isn't working on Android, he's paddling
  https://youtu.be/tZC2rmUdEVk

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.

Jean-Michel: google.com/+JeanMichelTrivi
Romain: google.com/+RomainGuy, @romainguy
Tor: google.com/+TorNorbye, @tornorbye
Chet: google.com/+ChetHaase, @chethaase

Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.