From: Noah Smith <midblue_at_carolina.rr.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:27:24 -0500

Hello,
I've been playing with the cvs builds of rockbox on my V2 Recorder lately,
after upgrading it from 2.3, and I first wanted to say that the new ID3
browser is excellent. I still like folder browsing much of the time, because
of the way I organize things, but it's great to have browsing by a database
as well.

The ID3 database, and imo its faster speed/responsiveness, is what got me to
thinking about one other aspect of playback that's typically slow on HD and
CD mp3 players, changing tracks before the end. I started thinking about it,
and I had a thought that might work to speed up track skipping in many
instances. I'm not a programmer, so my idea is mostly abstract, but
hopefully it'll make enough sense...

This is all going on my current conceptions about how the buffer code works,
so I apologise if I'm flat out wrong or something. Basically, I think we
could speed up track changes very noticably by effectively splitting the
buffer into two parts. Currently, the buffer loads the playing song as far
as possible, and then if there is any room left, loads some of the next
track. What could be done, is to make a part of the buffer permanently
reserved for the next track on the playlist. When the playing song's buffer
first fills, so does the next track's smaller pre-buffer.

Because of this, changing to the next track would no longer involve waiting
for the drive to spin back up, as the pre-buffer would take over until the
harddrive was up to speed again. The end result would be a mostly
instantaneous change from one track to the next. Obviously the buffer would
need to last at least as long as whatever a worst case scenario spinup would
be, but it seems like it'd be doable, at the least in 8meg expanded units,
if not stock models.

Thanks,
Noah



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Received on 2005-02-15