A long time ago (about two and a half years), and on a completely different blog, I bemoaned the lack of USB Audio support on Android. There were little hints of it buried in Ice Cream Sandwich, some proprietary solutions surfaced, and a few developers on XDA managed to get some forms of it working on certain devices running certain kernels with certain apps.
It wasn’t looking good.
USB Audio has long been one of the few features iOS could handily beat Android at. Plug a USB mic into an iPad. It worked. Plug a Headphone amp into an iPhone. It worked. Plug an iOS device into a car with USB support. It worked. I happen to be a recording professional, and drooled over mixing consoles which supported the iPad, but the benefits for general consumers were pretty clear too. You can even plug USB mics into Windows Tablets, USB Headphone Amps too.
During the Google I/O 2014 Keynote, we got yet another tease at a feature that many have been looking forward to since the platform’s inception. Buried in the list of updates projected on the wall were mentions of low latency audio recording and USB Audio. Be still my beating heart.
So what are these updates good for?
I’m over-simplifying, but the way apps currently run on Android make it very difficult to develop a proper recording app. Say you’re trying to record a singer while playing the music. On some devices, the delay between when audio played and the voice would be recorded was a half a second or more. Completely unacceptable even for “fun” apps. Try and do karaoke and purposely sing a half second behind. It’s really difficult to do, and compensating for it in software can be prohibitively difficult given the wide range of devices you’d need to support in the Android ecosystem.
That USB Audio support will also hopefully provide for a whole new range of accessories and support. USB mics, interfaces, using an Android tablet as the brain for a mixing console, or working in tandem with Android Auto for faster audio input (voice commands) and higher quality output.
Rumors have been flying that Apple might do away with the headphone jack on a future iPhone or iPad, utilizing the Lightning connector solely for audio. Conceivably proper USB Audio support could provide this benefit to Androids as well. It would reduce the manufacturing costs of phones as they would no longer need a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC), and depending on the quality of headphones connected of course, the actual output would be a pure high quality digital stream.
For rugged phone fans, it would also be one less port to waterproof. Take a phone like the GS5, all you would need to do is add a locking gasket, a little bit of plastic and rubber to the USB jack on the headphones to maintain a watertight seal.
We of course have no confirmation on whether Android L will actually enable all of these features. We wont know until updates start rolling out. Until then we can have a little fun speculating on a feature which Google has ignored for far too long. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just be sitting here trying not to get my hopes up in case it doesn’t happen…