On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Christopher Woods wrote:

> Afaik, none of the platforms Rockbox run on are capable of multi-threaded
> decoding of more than one file at once

You don't need that in order to get gapless playback. That is just a common
misconception.

> this is one of the few things the Rio Karma was good at because it had
> multiple hardware decoders, enabling true gapless playback

First, I _very_ much doubt that the Rio Karma has or had "multiple hardware
decoders". Secondly, I doubt that Rio Karma's gapless abilities is much better
than Rockbox on software codec platforms. They could possibly "cheat" the way
winamp does and the way Rockbox already can (by doing various kinds of
crossfading).

I am convinced this believed "greatness" of Rio Karma is mostly a myth.
(Admittedly I've never seen one or tried one myself but I've also never got a
perfect explanation or dissection of the gapless area by a skilled (Rockbox
type) engineer.)

> the Archos, iRiver et al. only have one hardware decoder.

The iriver models have no hardware decoder, we do it all in software. I'm sure
the Rio Karma software does it that way too.

> have multithreaded decoding of files to enable true gapless.

You most certainly do not need that.

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/