Clip Zip tediously slow track skip (large covers)

[urbanhusky]

Hi,

currently my Clip Zip is not useable as it freezes on every new track for a good couple of seconds. I'm playing from a FAT32 formatted 32GB class10 microSD.
Most folders have large covers since I copied a part of my music collection. As soon as the cover is loaded, the track starts playing fine.

Is there a way to turn this off or at least have rockbox try and load the cover in the background while playing music? I don't care that much about the cover but it would be nice to have. I'm not keen on running a search and replace (or Irfanview batch processing run with resizing) on the data - since I'd need to do this every time I copy music...

regards,
urbanhusky

[saratoga]

It already is loaded in the background actually.  How large is the cover?   I wonder if you just run out of RAM trying to parse it. 

[Crafty]

What theme are you using?

Try using the cabbieV2 theme.....just for testing.  That one uses the least ram.     

[urbanhusky]

Even with cabbieV2 I get ~8 seconds per track loading time.
The cover.jpg is ~3MB, there are other covers in the same folder (back, booklet etc.) with less but still substantial sizes.

[saratoga]

The size of the file is probably the issue.  If the art isn't already on the buffer, it has to be loaded and resized.  Probably what happens is that since the available RAM buffer is very small on the Zip, your art is never available in memory, so you have to wait while its fetched, decoded and rescaled. 

[urbanhusky]

The size of the file is probably the issue.  If the art isn't already on the buffer, it has to be loaded and resized.  Probably what happens is that since the available RAM buffer is very small on the Zip, your art is never available in memory, so you have to wait while its fetched, decoded and rescaled.

So my only choice is to either remove or resize all artwork?

[[Saint]]

Essentially, yes.

The album art on your device is far, far, far greater sized than it need be. Your screen is a tiny 96x96px, so any image greater than that resolution is absolutely unnecessary.

If you refer to the manual for your device, you can see that album art is loaded preferentially, so it is possible for you to keep your needlessly massive (for this purpose, at least) album art on the device (though, essentially all it will do is waste storage) as well as a much smaller resolution version specifically for Rockbox to use. The above link will take you straight to the area of the manual explaining the order of preference in which album art is used.


[Saint]

[urbanhusky]

Essentially, yes.

The album art on your device is far, far, far greater sized than it need be. Your screen is a tiny 96x96px, so any image greater than that resolution is absolutely unnecessary.


[Saint]

Like I said, I copied it from my music library which is the source for more playback devices/software than just rockbox Not every device will output a low-resolution cover.
I'll try to batch-replace the covers later. I can't boot into the stock firmware with the SD card because it endlessly tries to refresh my media.

[[Saint]]

Looks like you replied while I was still thinking/editing, my prior post (now) suggests an option where you can keep the massive art as well if you'd like to.


[Saint]

[urbanhusky]

Looks like you replied while I was still thinking/editing, my prior post (now) suggests an option where you can keep the massive art as well if you'd like to.


[Saint]

Thanks, I'll most likely have to replace some covers though - also I noticed that there is no PNG support so I might have to do rockbox-specific covers anyway.

[urbanhusky]

Okay, with 3.13 and resized covers it works better - BUT large embedded covers still cause very long loading times :\

[AlexP]

I fear you are expecting too much from a small embedded systems with low resources.  The Clip Zip has 8 MB of RAM, with probably 4.5 - 5 MB of free buffer.  This is only slightly larger than one of your images compressed, let alone the audio data that is also needed to play the track.

[urbanhusky]

There isn't an option to turn off cover loading completely, right?  (would be nice to have though)
Or could anyone give me a hint how I could remove the covers that are integrated into the files?

[saratoga]

There isn't an option to turn off cover loading completely, right?  (would be nice to have though)

I don't think so, but there probably should be.

Or could anyone give me a hint how I could remove the covers that are integrated into the files?

tag&rename, foobar2000, any other tag editor.