Clip+ and playlist limit

[mouthwatering]

I have about ~10k tracks on a 8+16gb Clip+ and so far, this works very well. I've currently set the playlist size limit to 2k tracks. But occasionally I want to listen to all tracks on the Clip+ and the player breaks building the dynamic playlist when it reaches the 2000th track. Fair enough, that's what I told it.

My "problem" now is that I have no idea what this limit entails. It seems that if I set the limit to 8k or 11k, say, the player allocates some more memory for the playlist and less for the actual playback buffer. So far, so good. Does anyone have an idea about the real numbers involved in this? Ie a 10k playlist eats 12.5% of the memory and 87.5% are left for the music. Or whatever...?

Since the player is not hard disk based, I'd assume that the buffer size is not really so important anyway. Am I wrong in thinking that?

cheers wm

[CrowdAds]

[saratoga]

Change the limit and then see how much audio buffer changes by in the debug screen.

[mouthwatering]

Originally Posted by saratoga

Change the limit and then see how much audio buffer changes by in the debug screen.

Yeah, I've already tried that but w/o luck. The only place where I could find something about playlists is in the "View OS Stacks" section. However, the number there is always 4%, whatever the value of the playlist size limit. Either I'm looking in the wrong place or it's a bit of information not available in the debug screen.

Anyway, as long as the player does work, the buffer size for audio shouldn't be much of a concern, I think...?

Cheers wm

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by mouthwatering

Yeah, I've already tried that but w/o luck. The only place where I could find something about playlists is in the "View OS Stacks" section. However, the number there is always 4%, whatever the value of the playlist size limit. Either I'm looking in the wrong place or it's a bit of information not available in the debug screen.

Anyway, as long as the player does work, the buffer size for audio shouldn't be much of a concern, I think...?

Cheers wm

Look for the screen that shows that size of the audio buffer. There should only be a few screens so its not too hard to find. Note the size before and after you change that setting. Subtract them. That is the number you want.

[mouthwatering]

Originally Posted by saratoga

Look for the screen that shows that size of the audio buffer. There should only be a few screens so its not too hard to find. Note the size before and after you change that setting. Subtract them. That is the number you want.

Ah yes. I found a number for "buffer" in the Rockbox Info screen, not in the Debug Menu. This shows 6.41mb for a playlist of 1000 with 1000 entries and 6.33mb for a playlist of 12000 with 10171 entries. Not much of a difference;-)

Thanks wm

[Timar]

That's really a huge buffer size - large enough to hold more than one minute of 16/44.1 audio, which seems quite exessive for a flash memory player. I wonder if it would make sense to have memory consuming options like this one enabled/set to a higher value by default for those devices which have enough memory anyway?

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by Timar

That's really a huge buffer size - large enough to hold more than one minute of 16/44.1 audio, which seems quite exessive.

It holds compressed audio, not PCM, so its much more then 1 minute. Thats the idea, the more you hold in memory the less often you have to power up the NAND flash memory.

Originally Posted by Timar

I wonder if it would make sense to have memory consuming options like this one enabled/set to a higher value by default for those devices which have enough memory anyway?

I'm open to changing the default values to make them more target specific then they are, but I don't know much about this specific setting. Probably best to ask in IRC about it.

[mouthwatering]

Originally Posted by Timar

That's really a huge buffer size - large enough to hold more than one minute of 16/44.1 audio, which seems quite exessive. I wonder if it would make sense to have memory consuming options like this one enabled/set to a higher value by default for those devices which have enough memory anyway?

That's precisely the reason why I wanted to get a feel for the "real" numbers involved here.

And since I use only 64kb VBR WMA (on the Clip+, that is, on my PCs and the other players I use MP3) 6.3mb should be good for ~13 minutes music. That's more than enough so I will probably now switch on some of the caches.

Cheers wm