Optimizing Finamp: battery drain, artwork caching, track highlight bug

[unthoiz]

Hey everyone 👋

First of all, thank you for your efforts in redesigning and improving it. It looks great!

I hadn't tried the beta until yesterday when I went to GitHub and saw it by chance. I'm an F-Droid user and was using the old release. Would it be a good idea to publish some of the current version as a release or have them appear on F-Droid?

On the other hand, I’ve been digging into some of the performance quirks in Finamp and started working on a few fixes that could make the app feel smoother for all of us:

• Properly disposing AudioPlayer instances to cut down battery drain.
• Making artwork caching more consistent so we don’t keep re-downloading covers.
• Fixing the initial highlight bug in song lists (so the right track is selected right away).

My plan is to profile each change before/after (CPU, memory, battery) and share the results here so we can see the impact clearly. Since I don’t have iOS devices, I’ll need help from the community to test on iOS once I open PRs.

If anyone’s already working on similar stuff, or wants to help test, let’s coordinate so we don’t duplicate efforts. Happy to collaborate and document everything so it’s easy to follow along.

Thanks!

[Chaphasilor]

@unthoiz sadly F-Droid doesn't support beta versions well. We'd need to release them as a separate app, which is then also installed separately. But you can use an app like Obtainium for auto-updates until the beta is pushed to stable (which should happen early next year).

Your optimizations seem great! So far optimizing caching, visual rendering, and performance in general have been mostly handled by @Komodo5197, so that's who you want to discuss your changes with I guess. Also, you should probably open a draft PR sooner rather than later, so that other can more easily see what is being worked on, and so that we can give you feedback on your changes or give them a try ourselves. But it sounds really exciting!