Strategies for buffered file reading to guarantee low-latency

[garrilla]

I have a large, multi-channel audio file that's bigger than the target device's memory (a low-ram phone). Consequently, I need to do some buffered reading of the file.

Currently, I'm doing it on the audio thread. I'm generally not getting underruns, but occasionally some other services seem to have an impact and I'll get a little period of underruns. In a 30min playback, this might happen 3 or 4 times for less than a 1 second.

I'm thinking about what strategies I could use to move the buffered read off the audio thread, and with some stable read-ahead method probably reduce my underruns further. Do @philburk or @dturner or anyone else have suggestions here?

[garrilla]

OK, so down to one final issue on this.

If the screen goes off, it starts to glitch. The longer it is off, the more it will glitch. My device/app is playing a long stream, with head tracking. The screen doesn't need to be on.

I've introduced a PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK, but that doesn't help.

Any thoughts on this?