flutter_sound: [HELP]: flutter_sound audio package conflicts

@tan-yaka, @quickratio, others,

you are my friends, my only friends. What happens to my mother is horrible. She is 94y old.

I feel better when I know that I have friends all around the earth

I do not really know what Flutter Sound users like about this product. Myself, what I appreciate on this project is the possibility to manage Audio Streams. I think that Flutter Sound is the only Flutter plugin doing that.

But managing audio streams on Flutter Sound is far from perfect. There are many issues around this feature. Taudio will be a complete rewrite of Audio Streams. Of couse I am sure that you cannot wait several months for Taudio. So I will try to do some maintenance on Flutter Sound.

I just would like that you do not discourage and that you will be one of the first Taudio user.

@quickratio we had a requirement to recognise some weird drug names (most of which I couldn’t even pronounce!) and at the time MS STT was the only service that allowed us to train the speech model to recognise them using actual audio + transcriptions, and it worked really well. I know some of the other STT services now allow for this kind of training but we have invested a lot of time in perfecting our training method and amassed a lot of training data. I agree the Google STT API is far superior to the on device service. I’ve looked at other services like AWS Transcribe and found that to be the most difficult to implement and poorest performing in terms of accuracy. I’m going to be looking at some the smaller outfits offering STT like Speechly and Deepgram soon.

Laroux, you’re a bona fide f**king legend! I love you hahaha, seriously. How do you even figure this stuff out?

I hope someday we can work together on something, when i launch (hopefully soon, it is in beta!) i’ll shoot you a link, i’d be honoured if you had a look and gave feedback, after all, you’re part of it! 😃 (do you have an email i can communicate to you with, if you’re interested i can show you my project).

Also do you mind if i share this in other threads, as i know others had the exact same problem.

Thanks again! ❤️

@quickratio :

1. TL;DR : Restore a correctAudio Session before starting the recorder

A correct fix for your issue is :

• Add a dependency to the Audio-Session plugin
• Set a correct audio session for recording before startRecorder() :

    final session = await AudioSession.instance;
    await session.configure(AudioSessionConfiguration(
      avAudioSessionCategory: AVAudioSessionCategory.playAndRecord,
      avAudioSessionCategoryOptions: AVAudioSessionCategoryOptions.allowBluetooth,
      avAudioSessionMode: AVAudioSessionMode.spokenAudio,
      avAudioSessionRouteSharingPolicy: AVAudioSessionRouteSharingPolicy.defaultPolicy,
      avAudioSessionSetActiveOptions: AVAudioSessionSetActiveOptions.none,
      androidAudioAttributes: const AndroidAudioAttributes(
        contentType: AndroidAudioContentType.speech,
        flags: AndroidAudioFlags.none,
        usage: AndroidAudioUsage.voiceCommunication,
      ),
      androidAudioFocusGainType: AndroidAudioFocusGainType.gain,
      androidWillPauseWhenDucked: true,
    ));

2. Long version

On iOS, each App has its own Audio Session, but unfortunately, there is only just one audio-session for each running App. iOS is just a piece of bullshit. Because of this uniqueness, we get many compatibility issues when an App wants to use several packages which does not cooperate.

On Flutter Sound 8.x, we tried to manage ourself the Audio Sessions. It was convenient and was fine most of the time. But because of this management, Flutter Sound was badly compatible with others plugin. What happened was that each Plugin tried to fight for doing Session management.

The good way to fix this incompatibility, was to remove from Flutter Sound everything about Audio Session management, and rely on a federating manager (e.g. Audio-Session). It is what we did in FS 9.x

Everything will work correctly if no Audio plugins do Audio Session management, and if everybody rely on the federator : Audio-Session plugin. Actually I know two plugin which are good citizen and do not play with audio sessions

• Flutter Sound 9.x
• Just Audio

But many others plugin continue to try to manage the audio-sessions themselves. To solve that, you will need to to restore a correct audio session before startRecorder() (i.e. a session correct for doing a recording).

A crash is a terrible thing and is not good. A fix could be that FS checks that the session is correct and set itself a correct Session if necessary. But we will have again the same problems as in 8.x.

Another fix could be to check that the session is correct and throw an exception if not. I think that it is would be good and that is what I am going to do in 9.1.8

My crash was just because I forgot to put Recorder permission inside Runner/info.plist

	<key>NSMicrophoneUsageDescription</key>
	<string>This example wants to access your microphone</string>
	<key>UIBackgroundModes</key>
	<array>
		<string>audio</string>
		<string>processing</string>
	</array>

I am going to try to reproduce your crash, now.