Audio stops during playback

[nleo575]

While using plugins that record/process audio (ambient noise and conversations), audio will stop playing completely. The user has to manually restart playback by going into the respective app and resuming playback. This would happen every time the audio plugin started to record - i.e. with the same frequency as set in the app.

This mainly happened to users who were playing audio over bluetooth, but some users did notice the issue while playing through wired headphones.

This issue was repeatable and present on 62.5% (5 of 8) iPhones during our test.

Overall severity: Major UX problem - 4 out of 5 where 5 is worse. Since the problem would happen every 5 minutes in our case (that's the sampling frequency we set for the study), all users polled said they would probably not continue to use the app if this problem persisted.

To help testers during the study avoid the issue, they could simply force close the app and then open it again after they were finished listening to audio. Some users also turned off the two audio sensors while they were playing audio. One user also just deleted the app and had to rejoin the study again later.

[tetujin]

I transferred this issue to AWARE-library repository from AWARE-UI repository, because this is a bug in the AWARE-library.