From: Dave Chapman <dave_at_dchapman.com>
Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 13:08:05 +0100

Hello,

I've been lurking on this list for a couple of weeks, and am very
impressed with the recent CVS activity.

I only have limited experience of MP3 players (I don't own an Archos at
the moment), which may put me in a very good or very bad position to
suggest Rockbox functionality.

What I would like to see would be the idea of a "play queue". This
queue contains the songs that you have asked your Archos to play.

To this queue, you add either individual tracks, whole directory trees
or pre-defined playlists using the directory browser. You should be
able to add the songs to the end of the play queue (either in order or
randomly), or add the songs randomly in random locations in the play
queue.

You would also need functionality to control the play queue - reset,
pause, resume, skip to next track - and eventually also the ability to
delete and move songs in the play queue.

In terms of implementation, I would vote against using text files to
store the play queue, but instead have a binary data structure (e.g. a
doubly linked-list) stored on the hard disk, with some information (e.g.
the next 8 songs) cached to minimise hard disk accesses. The play queue
should take a constant (small) amount of RAM, independent of the size of
the queue.

I don't know if the Archos can currently do this, or if this is what the
developers have in mind for Rockbox. The recent mailing-list thread on
playlists doesn't mention queuing songs/playlists.

Regards,

Dave.
Received on 2002-05-01