Tidal with with high battery consumption.

jm1982

Hello everyone, I am new to GrapheneOS.
My music streaming app on Android is Tidal. Now I have the problem that it has a higher battery consumption on GrapheneOS than on stock Android. GrapheneOS approx. 50% under Stock approx. 30%.
Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

moonkidofdeauth

jm1982 Not an expert, but I wanted to help narrow things down. Are you streaming or playing downloaded tracks? What are the app's battery optimization settings? If you're up to it, Battery Historian could reveal a lot. It could be related to hardware acceleration issues, wakelocks, it looking for play services and failing, and looping said behavior, etc. Best of luck with it. I use tidal as well but have everything downloaded and denied it network access and don't have any battery issues for whatever that's worth.

r134a

Tidal offers FLAC, if u are listening to your music in FLAC format, a part of the higher energy consumption could be that. If u are streaming FLAC, it will have even have a bigger effect on battery drain as a song is FLAC format is substantially bigger than for example a mp3.

A song in mp3 could be approx 5mb, while that same song in FLAC could easily be 50mb. While streaming there needs to be 'downloaded more', hence the potentially bigger battery drain.
Also FLAC is uncompressed, it requires more 'processing power' to decode compared to mp3.

Lion

r134a Also FLAC is uncompressed, it requires more 'processing power' to decode compared to mp3

This is completely incorrect.
Flac is a lossless compresion format which enables to have the original PCM data back after decoding. While it's compression ratio is much lower than AAC or mp3 formats, which means the compressed file will be larger, it does not necessarily require more processing power for decoding a file back to the linear PCM data to be sent to the DA converter in your device

r134a

Lion i apologize for mentioning FLAC is uncompressed, seems i've had this wrong impression indeed. Though it is far less compressed than mp3. And i believe uncompressed FLAC exists? As i think i have these in my music library,
FLAC in itself isn't uncompressed.

I've made my statement that FLAC uses more processing power/battery based on remembering reading on a thread on this forum regarding batterydrain. I've found that post back:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20368-battery-drain-possible-solutions-and-ideas/17

missing-root

FLAC can be compressed while maintaining lossless quality, unlike WAV.

The point about bigger filesize is valid though. Streaming FLAC is pretty useless, as you mostly cannot hear the difference between OPUS and FLAC. Opus is used on Youtube and other platforms, free lossy codec.

FLAC really only makes sense for archiving, if you want to encode with a future lossy codec. Or if you work with music and want to do crazy things like slowing it down, or changing the pitch.

It might be that you just changed the settings in the Tidal app, or the app has a different quality preset when installed new.

Dont stream FLACs, you likely cannot hear a difference and as said, FLACs are huge. About 20 times larger than OPUS files.

Https://github.com/boredsquirrel/media-scripts

spammerofspam

There was a discussion about a month or two ago where a user reported that, based on their experiments, audio players sometimes used much less energy when various exploit protections were turned off for the app.

Depending on your threat model, you could try disabling exploit protections for the Tidal app and then checking if the battery drain changes.