Slow, crashing

[ygoe]

I'm looking for a decent audio player app for Android 4.4 and there are not many. Most are crap. VLC makes a very good impression from the UI and seems to be able to play new .aac files that neither Google Play nor AudioPlayer are able to open.

Unfortunately VLC is extremely slow. I hangs every now and then and doesn't respond anymore. The system asks me to stop the app. Maybe it can't handle my SD card directory with 8600 .aac files? It once was able to load them all into the list. That took about 20 minutes. I needed to delete the media database and restart the app because on the first try it was already freezing up. Now I wanted to use some of me .m3u playlists but it won't start playback. The file name of the m3u file shows up in the notification bar but nothing happens. The UI is then frozen again and I need to abort it.

Is that normal? Should I delete all my music and start small with 20 or 30 files instead of all? Why does it take so very long to list a few files in a directory?

Also it would be nice if VLC would understand that a file name like "Artist - Title.aac" actually consists of an artist and a song title and would group songs accordingly. My files don't have any metadata, only a file name built like this standard pattern.

[ygoe]

I can now play single songs from the songs tab. When I tap on it, it starts playing almost immediately, the the UI is frozen. After ~15s the title is shown in the notification bar. After ~20s the playing song appears in the bottom panel.

When I pull up the bottom panel to see the current playlist, the song appears with a duration of "0:00" in the list, but the total length is correct in the bottom progress indicator. Pausing it works immediately (but then nothing else works for ~10s). Resuming playback takes ~10s, frozen. Cycling through the repeat modes with the button at the right end of the bottom panel freezes the UI for ~5...20s each.

Starting a playlist takes forever. But there seems to be a difference between a playlist of .aac and one of .mp3 files. The mp3 playlist starts immediately and I can interact with the UI normally. The aac playlist (I have some songs in both formats for troubleshooting) only starts afer ~1 minute and then still doesn't update the UI. While I can continue to scroll the list, the bottom panel that shows the currently playing track is empty, completely white.

I've enabled the developer option CPU usage overlay to see what's going on. While I have to wait on the frozen VLC UI, the VLC app and the "sdcard" process show some activity (if I understand this overlay correctly). "sdcard" is mostly red, "vlc" green and red. Durin normal playback, VLC has little activity and "sdcard" is not in the list. I have the impression that VLC reads large uncached parts of the storage on every interaction.