Will a rockboxed mp3 player play while loading new music?

[aztek]

What I really want is to have the ability to put new music on my mp3 player while it is still playing ( preferably also still have menu access to it. Is this possible with rockbox?

I don't own a ipod or other mp3 player for that matter right now but would buy one if I could do this with rockbox. Or if somebody knows a mp3 player that can already do this that's fine as well. I have looked at a lot of them but all go into some kind of "computer mode" and don't allow menu access anymore. Unless i buy like a simple smartphone or something.

Cheers,

[AlexP]

No, you can only have one thing accessing the disk at once.  On targets with software USB it is technically possible, but that would lead to massive data corruption.

[scharkalvin]

Technically, this can work if the file system is multi-thread safe.
Plug a usb flash drive into your pc and multiple applications can
access the drive at the same time.

Of course, I don't know the file system code in Rockbox is multi-thread
safe (does Rockbox code even USE threads?).  Bottom line:
Don't compare an embedded firmware OS with a PC OS.  Different
missions.

[Llorean]

In USB mode the host OS is accessing the device directly. Rockbox doesn't really know what's being done. Don't imagine two apps accessing one drive. Imagine two host PCs accessing one drive without intermediate software.

[gevaerts]

As Llorean said, multithreading has nothing to do with it, the filesystem has to be multi-host safe. Something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFS2 would work. However, before you suggest to implement that let me warn you that I don't think you will find a single developer in favor if this...

A more realistic way to achieve your goal would be MTP, since this works at file level (as opposed to USB  MSC, which works at disk level). If and when MTP is supported it should be doable to allow playback to continue.

[cool_walking_]

I don't own a Sansa, but if they allow hotswapping of the microSD cards, that would probably be the closest you'll get until MTP is supported.