skips/pauses on playback of multiple formats on 80g ipod

[jskeen]

After doing a complete reset to factory on my ipod, I loaded rockbox using the rockbox utility.  All seemed to go well.  I then transfered about 20g of assorted MP3's and about 11g of shn and flac files into the root directory.  I originally had all the mp3 files in one "music" folder, and all the rest in a "noloss" folder.  I initiated the database, allowed it to run overnight, and wrote it to ram.  I had to expand the limits on folder entries to 6000 to display all titles.  However on playback I was getting consistent skips or pauses every few seconds, ie 2 to 3 seconds of music, two seconds of silence, then the music resumed.  After  some research, i broke up the music folder into 5 sub folders, and reduced the file limit to 1000.  this seemed to fix most of the skip problems with mp3 playback from either the file submenu or the database.  However ALL of the .shn and .flac files I have are still unusable due to skips and long pauses.   They are actually pausing more than they are playing. 

Anybody have a solution on tap?

[pondlife]

Make sure you're not using any CPU-hogging features - EQ, crossfeed, peak meters, a busy WPS maybe.

Make sure you have directory cache enabled.

pondlife

[jskeen]

That fixed it, I'm pretty sure it was turning on the directory cache that did the trick.  Thanks

[Army]

I'm not sure if my problem is the same, but I'll give it a try

I updated the rockbox firmware and did a complete rebuild of the database. What I saw was, that, because of my growing collection, the number of files of the database went from 9 to 10. Maybe that's the culprit, I don't know. But since then, playback always stops for some seconds (about 30 or so) while the harddisk is working heavily. I'm not sure, what my player (by the way, iPod Video 80G) is exactly doing there, but it seems like the playback priority is very low.. My settings are:
- I don't load the database into RAM (although I'd like to, but then it takes forever to start playback)
- I don't have activated the automatic update of the database (although I'd like to, but then it takes forever to start playback)
- After reading this thread, I activated the cache, but that didn't change a thing

I hope you understand, what I mean

[Army]

Hmm, maybe you didn't understand

I tried it a different way again, completely removed the .rockbox folder, threw the most up-to-date one onto my player, booted into the player, went into my music directory, started a song and waited for interrupts to come, which didn't come Fine so far.

Ok, changed the theme to my default one (Fullscreen), did a reboot (for all cache to be cleaned), again, no interrupts. Ok, let's again change something.

After activating the directory cache and the reboot, I received a message "scanning disk...", which took about 30 seconds, no interrupts, everything okay.

Ok, let's go directly into resuming playback after boot. The harddrive runs much longer than before (about 2 minutes!) and I'm sure it was close to interrupting.

Is it simply fragmentation of stupid fat32?! Like the system isn't already completely up and at the same time it already starts caching the music.

[pondlife]

Do you have database auto-update enabled?  If so, try turning it off.  Also try with and without Database in RAM.

The directory cache background scan might keep the disk running for a minute or so after boot (depending on how many files you have) - if you also resume playback while it's still scanning, it will take quite a bit longer so 2 minutes of disk activity sounds reasonable to me.

The point is that it should be a background task that doesn't interrupt playback streaming.  (It might make the UI somewhat slow to respond until it completes though.)

pondlife

[Army]

Thanx for your answer!

I'll again try out several settings and let's see, if it works again. I'll go searching for a Windows machine (I'm on Linux) to check the fragmentation, I'm quite sure, that this is also a reason for my problems.

edit:
Ok, I do have a workaround now, which is okay for me. I do activate auto update of the database, have directory cache enabled and load the database to RAM. After booting into Rockbox, I simply wait until the disc stops running around, which usually doesn't take too long, even after loading new stuff unto my player. After that, I start playback. No problems then.
But still, automatic resuming of playback would be very nice! I haven't checked the fragmentation yet, will do that soon, maybe a defragmentation solves the problem completely..

[Llorean]

You said music doesn't skip, but you think it's close to skipping. If it doesn't skip, what are you worried about?