Song selection is very laggy

musicadi

Hi Peter,

Maybe this was addressed, but can't find a thread about it.

In ST3, song display almost instant, after you tap it, even with waveform display enabled.

In ST4, it takes about 0,5 seconds or more to display the lyrics.

When you tap a song

list gets scrolled so that the selected song is shown in the middle of the screen. The scrolling is very laggy (and probably unnecessary)
the lyrics and PLAY label only get displayed once the song you selected reaches the middle of the screen (takes at least 0,5 seconds)
NEXT label appears a bit earlier (about as quickly as in ST3)
selected song gets a second background, which disappears after about 5 seconds (maybe this is what's causing the lag?)

Suggested fixes

don't scroll the song list on song selection
remove the temporary background for current song

iPad Air 3
iPadOS 26.1
ST4 build 1977

AnthonyB

musicadi list gets scrolled so that the selected song is shown in the middle of the screen. The scrolling is very laggy (and probably unnecessary)

Yeah, I see what you mean. And that behaviour is inconsistent with Playlist behaviour where the selected song doesn't cause the playlist the scroll to vertically center the song. I would agree that Song selection behaviour in Songs list should change to not try to center the song, causing some time delay as the songs list scrolls.

musicadi selected song gets a second background, which disappears after about 5 seconds (maybe this is what's causing the lag?)

I think I know what you are saying here.
It looks like as you select the song it gets a dull orange background highlight before we get the Green highlight?

I wonder if there is some redundant operation occurring that doesn't need to occur?

I was also testing on iPad with iOS26.1.0 and ST4 1977.

peter

It takes time to load a song into the player. The lyrics are only displayed once the player is ready to play that song. So what happens is: you select a song, it gets highlighted to show you that this song was selected. At the same time, the player starts loading the audio files. Once this is finished. The song transitions to the PLAY indicator and lyrics are shown.

I can try to improve the performance but I'm not sure how fast this can get. ST3 was way faster because the audio players had only fixed 8 tracks and were reused. In ST4 each song can have a different number of tracks and each audio player needs to be created newly for each song. That's much more expensive. Reusing 32 track audio players is no option as they would eat up a ton of performance when most users don't even need close to 32 tracks.

Scrolling is running in parallel to loading. It does not slow down the loading itself.

musicadi

peter Ok, thank you. Can you maybe disable the scrolling when selecting a song in the song list?

AnthonyB

I'm assuming that the maximum number of tracks is always being loaded in both ST3 (8) and ST4 (32) irrespective of how many you are actually using?

If that is the case, would it be technically possible to implement a global setting that lets you switch between, say, 8/16/24/32 tracks (or even more granular of technically feasible) so that we can be more efficient?
For example, if I'm never going to use more than 8 tracks, and there is a permanent performance cost in always loading 32, then it would be ideal if I could set my ST4 install to 8 track mode. If my needs change in the future and I find I need more than 8 tracks, I change the setting and knowingly incur the slight performance hit associated with that.

peter

No, as I wrote above. In ST3 there are always 8 tracks initialized in the player and the player gets reused when switching from song to song.

In ST4 each song creates players with only the needed number of tracks.

AnthonyB

peter ah, ok. I misunderstood how ST4 was working. Thanks for clarifying!

But still, you say that ST3 reused an 8 track player whereas ST4 is making a new player every song based on the number of tracks. So if this new method can't be optimised to (ideally) performance parity with ST3, then is it viable to revert to a 'fixed number of tracks reusable player' model like ST3, and implement my suggestion of a global setting for 'number of tracks'?

Or even a global setting of: Dynamic, 8, 16, 24, 32 tracks - where all the integer values are defining a reusable player optimised to the maximum number of tracks the user needs?

peter

No, reusing the audio player also caused all those out of sync issues when running with inconsistent sample rates. Creating new players ensures that the track timings will reset every time you load a new song which will ideally solve the sample rate issues once for good (I hope).

musicadi

@peter I still find it weird that, with automatic queue handling off, when you tap a song, it’s selected instead of being loaded, and after 5 seconds the selection is “cleared” (tint background disappears). Could it be instantly loaded on single tap and maybe use double tap to add to queue, if needed?

Also, are you sure the sequence: select song > load song is not causing lag?

The queue could imho also be a cause for the lag. Is there a possibility to lose it altogether, and only have following behaviour:

Tap a song > it gets loaded into the player (without being added to the queue).

Thank you!

peter

No, the only cause for the lag is loading the song. The more tracks you have, the slower it loads. Songs without tracks load immediately.

musicadi

peter on my side, an empty song (no audio, no lyrics) loads just as slow as any other song.

https://imgur.com/a/03G82XC

peter

I wouldn't consider that to be slow. But I will keep this thread to see if I can improve the song loading performance somehow. Maybe load in the background and switch the UI early. Something like that. It will feel faster but you might have to wait before starting playback.

musicadi

peter Cool, thank you!

musicadi

peter Btw, I think maybe it just feels slow because that laggy movement going on in the sidebar:

“Selected” background appears
Current song is scrolled to the middle of the screen (very laggy scrolling btw)
“Play” and “Next” labels appear
“Selected” background disappears (about 5 seconds after you tapped the song)

So I think getting rid of all this visual stuff happening would definitely make it feel faster.