openSL ES Android: Irregular audio callback(s)

Question

I'm using openSL ES in one of my Android apps. When the app is in the foreground the callbacks are pretty regular. The mic callback is called approximately every 10ms and so is the speaker callback. However, if I put my app in the background and open up a browser (or another app for that matter) I see that a "storm" of callbacks are triggered upon opening up the browser (or browsing). Is there a way to get around that? And why does it happen? Is openSL compensating for a period of time where it wasn't able to execute the callbacks? (like it's trying to catch up).

My source code is in C and I'm on Jelly Bean 4.3.

I have tried to increase the thread priorities of AudioTrack and AudioRecorder, and it does seem to help, but I'm not sure that's the way to go.

ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS

So you're saying that even with increased thread priority you might get a burst of callbacks and that you should discard those ?

How is that a good solution? You'll be dropping mic packet (or draining the source of the speaker packets), right? If you don't drop mic packets, the receiver of the mic packets will interpret the burst of mic packets as excessive jitter, right?

More importantly: I manually increased the thread priority of AudioTrack and AudioRecorder and changed the sched policy to round robin. It required both root access and installation of BusyBox (which comes with a command line util for changing thread priorities/sched policy). How is this done programatically from C ? I want to make sure that it IS the individual thread priority that is increased and not just the priority of my app (process).

Answer 1

Yes, this is by design. Trying to push the thread priority high is the legitimate way to work around. Make sure to work with native buffer size and sampling (see Low-latency audio playback on Android) for best results. You should still be prepared to discard bursts of callbacks because there is no way to guarantee they will never happen. You should also try to reduce overall CPU consumption and RAM footstamp of your app while it is in the background.