Ie. if I'm playing a 1 minute song, the whole song should get buffered up. Obviously, if I click 'pause' or change the volume, the buffer should be discarded.
But the long buffer should let my phone sleep more of the time (saving power), and survive poor radio connectivity.
From my foray into audio app (quite a while ago, I admit), I imagine application support would be tricky as well.
RAM uses less power than keeping a radio alive, so I suspect aggressive buffering is a net energy saver.
It was a very delicate experience.
PulseAudio calls it "rewinding" for example:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documen...
Of course, the cynic in me wonders why we can’t do AirPlay 2-style functionality with simple Bluetooth and BLE speakers, but Apple wants to preserve their margin and ecosystem. Literally lossless headphone audio was mostly a thing with cords, and we’re still playing catchup to the idea.
I do remember a brief period a period in the late 00’s when “MP3 headphones” were a thing, and you could add an SD card to your headphones and listen wirelessly. I’m not sure any of those supported FLAC though.
My suspicion is that in the future, we will skip Bluetooth and go straight to wifi and cellular, where these tiny AirPods end up connecting to audio sources directly and basically only use BLE to sync between themselves. That way you can “leave the phone at home,” etc. They would probably have built-in storage too, for offline support.