will r15955 change to database metadata handling break non-dircache targets?

[bascule]

Preserve song statistics when moving files or altering metadata. Conditions required to apply: song length must not change AND either filenames (with path) must match or two of the following tags matches: artist, album, title. IMPORTANT: Currently dircache enabled and DB loaded to RAM is required for reliable operation of this feature.

This sounds like a useful feature for me, as I tend to tweak metadata and also operate more than one target with slightly different directory structures that I would like to move database information between.

So what do I do on my Sansa e280, where I don't have the directory cache option?

I'm sure I read somewhere on the site, although I can't find it now, that the sansa does not have dircache because it's a flash memory player.

I believe the lack of it means that both database refresh on startup and browsing through the database are slow and/or clunky.

Is there a technical reason why dircache can't be implemented and, if not, is this change going to cause buggy database imports?

[pondlife]

I'd think the intention was that flash players don't need dircache as there's no major delay waiting for the disk to spin up.

Hopefully any code (e.g. in the database handling) that checks whether dircache is enabled also checks if it's a flash target, so as not to penalise users of such devices.

I'm not familiar with the database code myself, but I'm of the general opinion that we should avoid having such checks, so the outcome of an update would at least be consistent, even if it takes a stupid amount of time and battery on a non-dircached HD target.  Simple is good.

pondlife

[pixelma]

To my knowledge the reason for Sansas not having dircache is that they have multivolume and thus dircache size would vary, I think the e200 had dircache as long as it didn't support the microSD slot. Personally I don't see the necessity for dircache on flash devices though.

The problem is that some database features like for example "auto-update" rely somewhat on dircache. I've been told that "auto-update" would work without it (when I tried on my Ondio) and that it only would be slower - but: even a manual "update now" never worked reliably for me when trying with and without MMC. This dependency is a long standing issue and even though I don't care much about the database I'd rather like to see something done about that...