Audio Rendering Issues

There is a well-known hardware issue in Chrome Android on some Android devices that can visually affect web apps. Unfortunately, Google decided to leave this bug unfixed for years now, and they didn’t give a signal about changing this any time soon (see below).

This causes some prevalent issues in AudioNodes Online, in particular screen flickering and “jumping” on the Patcher (connections between nodes), as well as most nodes on the Timeline.

Solution

To get rid of this issue, you need to disable 2D canvas acceleration in Chrome Android:

  1. Open Chrome Android
  2. Type chrome://flags into the address bar and go there
  3. Find Accelerated 2D Canvas and disable it
  4. Restart Chrome

Effects of this change

Changing this setting will change it not only for AudioNodes Online, but also every site you visit. This, in some rare cases, will slightly reduce performance of some websites (see technical details below). If this setting causes noticeable performance issues for you, you can re-enable it any time, and disable again before opening AudioNodes Online.

Android technical details

This issue affects a frequently redrawn HTML5 canvas, which AudioNodes Online uses at several places throughout the app. The previous canvas contents are not always cleared correctly, and keep coming back seemingly randomly, causing the flickering.

Several other people encountered this bug, and discussed it at the Google issue tracker:

We will investigate workarounds soon.