Disk access

[amey01]

Hi,

My first post so please be kind - I've searched but can't find anything relating to this issue.

I've just downloaded Rockbox for a 60GB 5g iPod and love it! The only problem is that when I select music to play the Hard Disk is accessed continually.

Under the iPod firmware the disk would spin for about 10 seconds to fill the buffer then turn off.

Under Rockbox, the disk access light will flash on and off for at least a minute, but sometimes continually. If I press "Pause" then it will continue to spin for about 5 seconds then turn off. After pressing play again, all is well until the buffer runs out when the disk starts its continual access trick again until I press "Pause".

I downloaded on 15 July, but updated last night in case this was a bug that was solved.

Any way to stop this?

[linuxstb]

What format music are you playing?

I've only experienced this behaviour when playing very high bitrate MP3 or AAC files - they take so much CPU to decode, that Rockbox can't keep up with filling the buffer at the same time, so the disk never spins down.

Also, are you using other CPU-intensive features such as the EQ?

[amey01]

Well, I think you've got it.

Yes, I am using ALAC.

Yes, I am using the EQ, but only the LS filter and only below 30Hz.

Any way around this - short of listening to horrible compressed files?

[safetydan]

The EQ is CPU intensive, though one band shouldn't be causing issues. Try disabling the software EQ and see if your disk issues go away. ALAC by itself shouldn't stress the CPU that much. Though I could be wrong on that.

[Llorean]

ALAC is big though, so the files are going to be consumed from the buffer quickly. That combined with our relatively slow buffering speed probably means the buffer is filled quite often.

He could always watch the audio thread screen from the debug menu to see what's going on.

[amey01]

Thanks - yes, the buffer is filled often (about every second song) but that's not the problem; the problem is that when the buffer is filled the disk doesn't turn off unless I press "Pause".

I'll try turning the EQ off.

Adam.

[Mikerman]

Ok, I doubt this is your issue, but you mentioned the size of your drive, and I recently had a large-drive cache experience:

Recently, my iRiver iHP-140 fell to a hard floor and the 60 gb drive I had put into it died.  (Sigh.)  I still had the player's original 40 gb drive (since wiped clean of data), and put that back into the player for the dead drive.  I then copied my back-up of some (a small percentage) of the player's files back to the newly-installed drive, including the Rockbox files.  (A pause for this commercial message:  back up your player's files.)

Turned the player on, and all was well, but:  the hard drive starting turning continuously.  I mean, it still was turning after 20 minutes.  And then after 45 minutes.

I couldn't figure this out and feared that there was other physical damage to the player, and then thought to switch back to the original iRiver firmware--no hard drive continuous spin issue.  And then I thought of the Rockbox directory cache feature, which I had on.  I turned it off, and:  no hard drive continuous spin issue.

What I then figured out was (my working hypothesis):  I had had over 43 gb of files on my 60 gb drive (about 500 CDs of music).  When I replaced that drive with the clean 40 gb drive, but then loaded back onto the drive my Rockbox back-up files and only a small percentage of my music files, the cache went into operation and saw that my drive's contents now were different than before, and it started to catalog the current contents, including by deleting the record of the no-longer-available contents; because of the size of the earlier drive and the earlier amount of its contents, that would take quite a bit of time.

And lo and behold, I left the player alone (with directory cache on) and after an hour of hard drive activity, the hard drive stopped spinning and I'm back to "normal" hard drive activity since . . . .

[ryran]

This sounds similar to an issue I used to have due to the font I was using (too big for the glyphcache). I doubt it's your issue, but it's worth ruling out. So what font are you using?

[amey01]

Thank you but no - it has nothing to do with browsing the menus - menu browsing is fine. It is playing music!