Developers - ringdroid - Information for developers

Updated Sep 14, 2009 by dmazzoni

Developers

Information for developers

Ringdroid is implemented in pure Java, and it serves as an excellent demonstration of what is possible using the Android SDK. It works identically on the emulator and on an HTC T-Mobile G1 handset.

Ringdroid uses the Android SDK to find media files, play and seek, and record. However, the SDK does not include any functionality for opening and decompressing compressed audio files. So, Ringdroid implements pure-Java audio file parsers. These parsers do not completely decompress the audio. Instead, they simply need to parse headers, frame headers, and just enough information from each audio frame to create a crude representation of the waveform. When the user wants to save a file, the audio file library copies entire audio frames from the original files and assembles them into a valid file of the same format. Thus no decompression or compression of audio ever happens in the pure Java code. The Android SDK is used to actually play the audio.

File formats

Supported file formats right now include:

WAV
MP3
3GPP/AMR (this is the only format that Android records into currently)
AAC/MP4 (including iTunes AAC files)

Editing and audio effects

Right now because the pure Java code only parses the frame structure of the audio file and cannot modify the waveform directly, it's hard to imagine doing more complicated audio effects like reverb, noise removal, etc. - however, here are some crazy ideas that might actually be possible given the significant limitations:

Fade in/out. All we'd need to do is modify the "gain" of each audio frame. This is potentially quite easy for MP3. For 3GPP/AMR it's also possible but there are often only up to 6 bits of resolution to play with per frame (unless the entire waveform is decompressed). For Ogg Vorbis it seems much harder.
Speed up / slow down. You could create a terrible sounding speed-up or slow-down effect by skipping every other frame or doubling each frame.
Silence. This is actually not a bad idea. If someone wanted to insert silence at the beginning, middle, or end, it would be relatively easy to add some "blank" audio frames
Pitch Change. You could change the sample rate from 8000 to something else, as long as the Android media player supports resampling from that new sample rate.
Tones. People could assemble a monophonic musical ringtone by assembling prerecorded audio frames of a tone. If we had tones fpr each audio format we could splice them into any other audio.
Repeat. Repeating is pretty easy, if someone wants to repeat a portion of the audio with a particular delay in-between. This potentially gives more control than just having the ringtone looped when it plays back.

Credits

Ringdroid's primary developer is Dominic Mazzoni, a Google employee who was also the original author of Audacity, a cross-platform audio editor for desktop computers.

Joseph Wain did the graphics and helped with the UI layout, and Eugene Koh acted as an internal advocate to make sure that Ringdroid was completed and open-sourced in time for the release of the first Android phone.

Join the team

This project is open-source. If you are a programmer, we would welcome your contributions. Please start by following the instructions on Building.

If you are not a programmer, you're also welcome to contribute in other ways. Submitting bug reports and feature requests is always welcome, although please be careful not to submit just anything as a feature request before checking to see if it's possible with Android. For example, playing protected iTunes audio files is impossible at this time.

Comment by loebner, Nov 06, 2008

Please, please, please, add an A-B loop function to repeat the selected section. Then you would have a wonderful language learning app. Also, if you could change speed of play w/o changing pitch, it would be a perfect language learning app.

suggestions: Repeat section continuously Repeat section n times Repeat section for n seconds

Hugh Loebner hugh@loebner.net loebner.net

Comment by jerry.howell08, Nov 06, 2008

How Do u Remove the other Ringtones that came wit the phone or even the songs on the ringdroid to make more space.

Comment by jmnale, Nov 16, 2008

This is a great program! Thank you for making this available to everyone. I have a question that I hope you can help me with... How is looping achieved with Android's ringtone system? I've loaded .wav files that have loop points set and saved (such as like a hardware musical sampler would read) but that did not work. The default .ogg ringtones that are pre-installed on the phone loop just fine, so there must be a way. Can loops points be saved in .ogg files? Any thoughts or ideas would be most appreciated. Please contact me at jmnred1_removethis(-a-t-)gmail.com.

Thanks! Justin

Comment by jasonuechi, Nov 21, 2008

Thanks for building this, thanks for releasing it open source. Bummed we're stuck with the recording limitations for this release, but, still, nice to have all of it to play with.

Comment by tekthe1st, Nov 23, 2008

Is there an expected release date for the version with fade in/out?

Comment by orion.the.project, Sep 18, 2009

Why do you send by internet The GPS location ???

IS IT HELPFULL TO CORRECT A BUG ?????

Please respect our privacy

Comment by jackcmkinney, Oct 29, 2009

The blackberry's chigong notifier is available as a MP3 download. This MP3 plays just fine on my Android G1 in either ringdroid or the music player. However, the ringtone generated by ringdroid comes out very choppy. Not sure if this is really a bug in ringdroid or not, but I thought I would report it; I would really like to have this ringtone...

Comment by gle...@engel.org, Nov 04 (4 days ago)

Do you know if Android allows generating custom ring tones on the fly? An interesting use would be to generate a morse code ring tone automatically for contacts. This type of audio could be generated in a fraction of a second given the text. Here's a site that generates audio files for morse code ring tones: http://www.planetofnoise.com/midi/morse2mid.php I suppose another solution would be to walk thru the contact list, generate files, and set the ring tone so it's all ready to go on incoming calls.