Google Adding Legacy Support for Older Audio Codecs to Fix Streaming Audio Issue
If you don’t already know, streaming music on Android 2.2 suddenly sucks, for the most part. At least over 3G and Edge connections, audio quality is so bad that it makes using several listening services – including Pandora and Slacker Radio – a pain. This is because – with the upgrade to FroYo – Google implemented a new media framework – Stagefright – that would bring about support for new high quality audio codecs, but to the dismay of many streaming music vendors, would also bring about the death of some of the older ones used in a majority of these applications.
Google’s obvious hopes were to get everyone to step up to their new standards, but the developers aren’t seeing it that way. I’m not sure how extensive a change must be made to support the newer codecs, but they’re not budging and it’s forcing Google to commit code to add support for the older codecs back into Android 2.2. It becomes a huge mess after you realize that the OEMs and carriers will need to bring the changes to you themselves, so there’s no telling when we might actually see the fix for a majority of devices (excluding the Nexus One, duh).
[Google Code via Android Central]