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I am trying to stream audio through a server. I have set up everything, and it's working fine with recording and playing back static audio, but when I am trying to stream an audio there is a delay on the playing side.

I did a Google search, but couldn't find the proper way of doing this. I am using AudioRecord & the Audiotrack Android media API for sending & receiving audio data. Can anybody tell me how to handle this delay?

I have added my code on GOOGLE GROUP to get clear picture.

I had tried in this way, holding 5 chunks of audio data in a buffer which comes through the server & playing back when it fills 5 chunks of data and again getting next 5 chunks of audio data and filling it like that it goes till 1024 bytes of data (it writes to the audiotrack & the play method is called).This too has a delay,any other solutions??

Rahul Baradia
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    There is inherent delay when buffering audio for playback, which you must do if you want a decent stream that doesn't cut out frequently on mobile devices. – Brad Sep 25 '12 at 20:29
  • you can't put in buffer what does not exist yet – njzk2 Oct 16 '12 at 07:45
  • then how should I play 5 chunk of data at a time.. I am getting delay in playing audio. can you help me out – Rahul Baradia Oct 16 '12 at 07:49

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If you're really trying to do this unbuffered, make sure whatever playback tool you're using is trying to play it back without a buffer. You will be hard-pressed to not have a delay. Nothing on TV, radio, etc. is really 'live'--there is always some kind of delay. With internet streams, you're sending a large amount of data constantly. Even besides the time for it to travel, all this data has to be kept in a particular order and nobody wants choppy playback while the enduser's computer attempts playback. I've had flash players for major networks keep massive cache files on my computer while it's handling playback, but their players do not skip/wait to buffer/etc. (If you load up something and notice a few 100 MBs of extra memory being used, maybe even more during playback, that's what that is.)

You might be able to get away with a very small buffer (the standard in the past used to be 30-60 seconds and a lot of players still default to this) using VLC. I have been able to set its buffer very low but it is on incredibly low quality streams/videos. The big problem you have though I'd guess is your playback is setting the buffer and if your playback is set to 60 seconds buffer, it doesn't matter what you do serverside...the client end will wait until it has that much of a chunk and then begin playback.

user1701047
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