How long to save a playlist?

[Zardoz]

I created a single, shuffled playlist of all the music on my iPod 80GB (approx 20,000 files) for those times when i cant be bothered to choose for myself. When I saved it, to root, it took about 90 minutes to save and almost completely ran down the battery! Is this normal??! Am I doing something wrong? Later I tried it again with latin-1 encoding and got much the same result. I'm using r17220. Any suggestions greatly appreciated...

(Apologies if this is covered elsewhere but i searched high and low and could see no mention. And  kudos to the developers and 'community' for a great piece of work    I think a paypal donation is long overdue from this quarter )

p.s. Over the weekend I tested the battery and from a full charge, playing the above playlist, a mix of mostly .ogg and .mp3 with some .mpc, with a flat EQ and no effects, at a decent volume (-25db), and occasional use of the backlight, I got just over 19.25hours continuous playback! Not very scientific I know but I was stunned!!

[Strife89]

I don't have that many songs, but that's definitely not normal. 90 minutes...... Wow.

Why you did that anyways, I have no idea. Here's a quick way to get a shuffled all-song playlist started:

From the Main Menu, long-select Now Playing/Resume Playback. Select Shuffle and set it to Yes, then return to the Main Menu. Go to Database, then Track, and hit select on whatever track you want to start with.

Presto!

[Zardoz]

heyy how do??! thanks for the help-reply-tip. i had thought by not initializing the database, leaving dircache off etc I was keeping things simple. now i'm building the database on the player but thats taking forever too! haha. i thought i read on these forums once that playlists, once saved, were faster to load (i.e. when not created and recreated/resumed dynamically). this bears out in my experience but id never until recently had a player with this capacity so was curious about others experience.

edit: ok i tried what you suggested but when i 'initialize' the database it takes ages and eventually freezes on track 14329. i have already set limits to 25000 for playlists and 10000 for directory.

computers are weird!

[Zardoz]

I deleted the playlist, ran disktidy, reduced the maximum files in playlist size to 18000 and maximum files in directory browser to 200 and remade and saved an all-inclusive-shuffled playlist. It took about 10 minutes to save this time. Does setting view files to 'all' mean that rockbox will create a playlist, when requested, of ALL files on the players drive??