A new version, 4.0, of the award-winning Icecast Player for Android has just been released!
By popular demand you can now influence how the application updates the list of radio stations:
- You can change the number of days for auto-updates from the default 7, or
- You can completely disable auto-updates.
Updating the list of stations can take a long time on Android devices due to their limited CPU power. The list comes in XML and needs to be processed to the internal database. Because it is large (over 10K+ entries), on Android we cannot use the standard XML-to-DOM converter – it is relatively fast, but needs a lot of memory – even more than the 48 MB heap space which Android 4.x offers. So, instead SAX is used, which has a very small memory footprint but, as a trade-off, is CPU-intensive. On a regular PC this is not an issue, but on a mobile phone or tablet it can take up to 5 minutes or more to update the stations – hence the option to disable auto-updates or to change the interval between them.