UI and Audio/Playback sluggish responsiveness on an iPod 5.5g 30GB

[Shovas]

I use an iPod 5.5g 30GB with a basic .m3u8 playlist, in shuffle mode, where the basic operation is clicking next if I don't like the song that's on.

What I find is that the UI and/or audio responsiveness is very sluggish. It takes upwards of 5-10sec to switch songs if I've already clicked next a few times.

When I first start playing it's slow, if I let it play through the song a bit, I "think" I can click next and get one or two or three songs forward very quickly, but after that clicking next is very, very sluggish.

I'm very grateful to the rockbox team (see previous posts) but it is quite atrocious. It's right at the limit of being unusable. What happens is I get to a song I don't like so I click next, and say I don't like the next, so I keep going. Absolutely consistently it will bog down and I won't be able to click next and actually get the screen to refresh to the next song nor the actual audio to get to the next song.

I assume others have experienced this.

What's the best way to increase UI and audio responsiveness?

[yapper]

Try turning Directory Cache ON
http://download.rockbox.org/manual/rockbox-ipodvideo/rockbox-buildch8.html#x11-1400008.5

[Shovas]

Thanks for the reply.

It was already on. I tried it turned off. Same thing.

I have a custom theme on, do they tend to slow things down?

[Lear]

Not really. Maybe if album art can affect things a little. But especially for HD based players, you will get a bit of delay after skipping a few tracks. The first few tracks are buffered in memory, so they're quick to skip to, but then the file needs to be read from disk, and this takes a little while.