ANDROID TIPS FOR ALL STREAMING RELEASES ON LOSSFOUNDATION.COM
Ideally, you could just pop open a Loss Foundation album link in your phone's browser and be able to cruise around town with it blasting continuously on your car stereo or headphones. From "our" testing, iOS / WinRT / even Blackberry users already seem to have that ability on lossfoundation.com without much trouble. However, and most unfortunately, Android users may have some difficulties peculiar to that OS and its many diverse implementations. Here is some advice to Android users wanting to hear fine, streaming Loss Foundation releases as they were intended with a minimum of hassle / headache:
- Our best advice: Install and use / listen to lossfoundation.com with Firefox for Android if at all possible. While we've not tested on ALL devices / versions of Android, the latest (23.0+) releases of Firefox for Android seem to work quite reliably / predictably with Loss Foundation in-page / multi-song audio streams, even when the device screen turns off. Sadly, this is something we can't say of most Android browsers.
- Some Android browsers will never show the "play" button in the LF audio-player widget even though they ARE actually ready to "play the page." If you see a "buffering" button in the in-page player widget, it's a lie. Press that "buffering" button to start playback and press it again to pause.
- In many Android browsers, playback may stop at the end of the current song, or before the end of the playlist generally, if the Android device's screen turns off. Some browsers will begin playback again if you simply turn the screen back on; others may require you to turn the screen on AND unlock before restarting playback in playlist-place; still others will hang / require you to refresh the page altogether and manually restart playback.
- If all else fails, download the audio files from the provided download-pack links and listen to the record "offline" (or simply load the page and listen on another device... or, y'know, download Firefox for Android).
Sorry, truly, that any of this is even necessary! "We" have really worked hard to make the music of the Loss Foundation as accessible and 2013-easy to listen to as possible (well, at least we want the music to be 2013-easy to listen to from a purely technical standpoint). Android's diverse ecosystem and still-sorta-maturing developmental status have frustrated those efforts on that particular ubiquitous platform. But hopefully, as time goes on, Google will resolve many of these frustrating weirdnesses in Android and you'll have no idea what I'm talking about with any of this - it will just be smooth streaming sailing.
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