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Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of iOS 11.3 to Developers [Updated]

deanthedev said:
Easy. Sending audio over WiFi to separate speakers is not as easy as it sounds. You need to make sure that both (if you have a stereo pair) get their audio at exactly the same time. Even the slightest delay in unacceptable.

Note that by delay I’m not talking about large obvious delays like the sound not syncing up with a movie where their lips are moving and their voice is completely out of whack. I’m talking about tiny millisecond delays. Our ears localize sound based on the volume and phase (time delay) that sound reaches our ears. If the signal is out of phase slightly (because of a slight time delay) it can have a significant affect on the sound.

I’m really very curious how Apple is going to deal with this.
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I get what you're saying. Doing this correctly is very technical.

The point is, they shouldn't have announced it and they certainly shouldn't have started selling a $350 speaker that is reliant on Airplay 2 for a number of its features.

The length of time it takes to complete this is dependent on the complexity of the project, the number of people working on it, the number of people testing it, the amount of time committed to the project, and I'm sure some other variables that I'm not thinking of. The point is, the consumer doesn't know the answer to any of these variables, so when Apple tells us something is coming and starts selling a product reliant on that feature coming, we need to trust that they've taken these variables into account and are giving us reasonable information. As someone looking to integrate my HomePod into my Sonos system, its disappointing to see how this looks to be shaking out.
 
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mcfly88 said:
They've had almost a year... I genuinely don't understand how it can be this delayed.
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Simply because Apple is terrible at networking and info sharing code, based on the many problems of iCould and the 5 years they took getting it tolerable, but not very good. If they wait to make AirPlay 2 work properly, my guess would be 2020 before it is released. That would assume that the few really good engineers they have get moved off the self driving car or Siri projects and placed on the AirPlay 2 project. Not likely to happen.

I really don't think Apple has a very good record of managing software quality, except in limited places where their engineers are so good that quality management processes are less important.
 
deanthedev said:
Easy. Sending audio over WiFi to separate speakers is not as easy as it sounds. You need to make sure that both (if you have a stereo pair) get their audio at exactly the same time. Even the slightest delay in unacceptable.

Note that by delay I’m not talking about large obvious delays like the sound not syncing up with a movie where their lips are moving and their voice is completely out of whack. I’m talking about tiny millisecond delays. Our ears localize sound based on the volume and phase (time delay) that sound reaches our ears. If the signal is out of phase slightly (because of a slight time delay) it can have a significant affect on the sound.

I’m really very curious how Apple is going to deal with this.
Click to expand...


Easy, they use a network clock and one of the homepods is the master clock. Basically the HomePods communicate with each other and have a reference time relative for each other. This stuff has been built into airplay for
A long time, iTunes has been able to stream music to multiple devices at one time, all perfectly in sync.

If your curious how Pro audio (think concerts) transmit audio over a IP network, web search “Dante Audio”.. this is a very robust and Versitle design that has been around for a while now..

What Apple is most likely having problems with is the active DSP part of it, having multiple speakers playing and actively tuning themselves in real time is hard when the speaker has to decern what it is hearing is what it’s producing and not what the other speaker is playing.. keep in mind it’s not just a matter of a left and right playing, it’s multiples of more than 2 that really starts to get stuff screwed up. I’m sure whatever they do will work and it will be “revolutionary” in how well it works, just like how the HomePod does it’s thing just as a single speaker..
 
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kenbewick said:
installing the public beta now.
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Yeah, some of the common bugs reported in the previous releases of 11.4 weren't things I wanted to risk having to deal with. This release sounds much more solid. Giving it a go now.
 
kenbewick said:
installing the public beta now.
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Me too. Really hope it makes CarPlay more stable. I have been getting multiple crashed where my '17 Honda Pilot suddenly loses connection to my phone. Sometimes a simple unplugged / re-plug takes care of it, other times it took a reboot. We will see.
 
Instead of adding new features, can we fix how slow and buggy the current version is? There's no reason why I'm able to type 4-5 characters on the keyboard before they start appearing in the text input box, other poorly optimized crap.
 
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XTOTHEL said:
Looking at the release notes, nothing. All fixes.
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That's good news, given my experiences so far with iOS 11.
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BasicGreatGuy said:
The thing is I don't want to put my Apple Watch on beta. And if I put the phone on beta, I would have to do the watch as well.
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Why do you believe that? It hasn't been my experience.
 
That long Siri delay I had is gone!!! :):apple:

(Siri text - not quite perfect, three mistakes)
This is a test does Siri work correctly now where is the delaying Siri why does this not work this is pretty instantaneous isn’t it this is so much better than used to be where there was a three second delay now there isn’t can three understand me when I’m talking really fast she sells seashells down by the seashore
 
mcfly88 said:
People on here will defend Apple for everything :rolleyes: Apple can do better, they have done better.. over the last few years they've been dropping the ball. It's not a matter of opinion, it's fact.
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What they NOT (?) defend is a bad command structure that is completely in vertigo and could not figure out where to go. They are the bronze league hero of modern companies in terms of leadership. No direction, no set path, only a bunch of people focusing on doing things that are still going.

There is nothing much a developer team can do for bad leadership.
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DNichter said:
Yes, absolutely do not put the watch on a beta. I made that mistake once.
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I bite the dust, take the risk and installs watch beta in my watch. So far so good, and it fixes my stalled out photo syncing.
 
My iPad pro 10.5 has really bad performance since this beta. apps needs ages to start. Anyone else with that issue?
 
BasicGreatGuy said:
It was years ago, if I remember correctly.
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I'm fairly sure this has never been the case, however the reverse IS true in that if you have a WatchOS beta installed, then you must also have the equivalent iOS beta (or newer) installed for the Watch to talk to the phone. Particularly as there is no easy way to downgrade WatchOS.
 
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agsystems said:
Agreed....this looks like a major screw up on the level of the discoveryd/mDNSResponder debacle.

https://9to5mac.com/2015/05/26/appl...omplaints-about-network-issues-with-yosemite/
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No it doesn’t, because they recognized in time that the feature isn’t ready and delayed it. The problem with discoveryd is that they shipped it, in all their OSes, then as reports kept coming in about bugs, they even stuck to it for several minor releases. That’s very different.
 
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You gotta love these light emiting asymmetric horns on Dan’s head in this video :)
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deanthedev said:
Easy. Sending audio over WiFi to separate speakers is not as easy as it sounds. You need to make sure that both (if you have a stereo pair) get their audio at exactly the same time. Even the slightest delay in unacceptable.

Note that by delay I’m not talking about large obvious delays like the sound not syncing up with a movie where their lips are moving and their voice is completely out of whack. I’m talking about tiny millisecond delays. Our ears localize sound based on the volume and phase (time delay) that sound reaches our ears. If the signal is out of phase slightly (because of a slight time delay) it can have a significant affect on the sound.

I’m really very curious how Apple is going to deal with this.
Click to expand...
If they can send stereo and have perfect lip sync for two channels, were it not similarly doable to send all data of four channels to two devices and have them filter out the unwanted audio? The sync of the current AirPlay is excellent, for two diffrrent stereo streams it should work just as fine if bandwidth allows the data traffic...
We’re not only talking left and right channel, to two dedicated / separate channel speakers, but also different sources and different outputs in AirPlay2, if I recall the feature correctly..?
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natebookpro said:
The point is, they shouldn't have announced it and they certainly shouldn't have started selling a $350 speaker that is reliant on Airplay 2 for a number of its features.
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Sadly it is becoming a irritating habit of Apple to sell future abilities in current devices. To me, it is like they put themselves in debt with us, and I can assure you that I don’t like it, and probably Steve wouldn’t either.

Actually, this most probably don’t fit in marketing deontology... it is misleading and gives very obviously no guarantees to us as consumers.

Apple wants to sell the skin of the bear before it took the decisive shot!! Just to hold us in their ecosystem. Some day, other companies will catch them, hell yeah!
 
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