Rockbox problems playing series of short sound clips (and also with Crossfade)

[JimmyRock]

I'm using an iRiver iHP-140...Not sure if this issue should be a bug report, feature request, both or neither, some guidance and input would be appreciated.  The following issue has occured with all Rockbox builds I've tried.

The issue is that playing many short sound clips in a row doesn't work very well.  To reproduce this, create a couple dozen or more short MP3 clips from 1 to 10 seconds long each (average around 3 or 4 seconds will do the trick, I'm also using VBR).  Turn Crossfade off (more on this below) and turn Shuffle off, make a playlist with all the clips in it, or just use the settings to play all files in a dir, and start playing.

First, for me, it takes a long time to start playing the first clip...but that might be that I have a lot more clips in subsequent dirs and it's filling up the buffer with dozens of clips...but shouldn't it begin playing quickly and load the buffer in the background?

Next, the WPS will not display the clips correctly...it usually displays data from a clip 2 or 3 later from the clip that's actually playing, then when the sound catches up, depending on how long the displayed clip is, it might show the progress bar briefly, but the display will change before the bar gets to the end, probably skipping far ahead again in a fairly unpredictable pattern.  (I notice that the WPS switches to the next song before the current one is done, regardless of the song length...a bug?  Never see the progress bar hit the end.)

At random some short clips will not play all the way through, they get cut off by the next one.  It even seems like some will be skipped entirely.

If you try to go back while playing the set of short clips, it's inaccurate at best, and the WPS display doesn't help.

Not sure why all the above happens, but it makes playing a set of short clips difficult at best.

Now, if you enable crossfade with short clips, it's even worse.  Depending on your settings, you might not even hear the clips, or just hear them briefly fade in then out again.  I'd like to see the crossfade function intelligently determine if the sound clip is a certain percentage of the total fade-in and fade-out time (maybe 50%?), and either not do the fade or do a quicker, truncated version of it.  For instance, say fade-in is 3 seconds and fade-out is 4 seconds, totalling 7 seconds, a clip would have to be 15 seconds or more for the fade to work.  Or even better, make the crossfade fade-in and out a percentage of total song length instead of a fixed value...this would be a feature request I guess...

Anyway, all feedback is appreciated,
-JimmyRock

[mlind]

This might be beside the point, but a CD track can not be shorter than 4 seconds if it's on a standard audio CD.

How come you want to use clips as short as 1 second?

[JimmyRock]

How come you want to use clips as short as 1 second?

Almost all are longer than 1 second.  I have a lot of sound clips from movies and TV shows, and from some audio CDs (like the "Fingertips" short songs on the They Might Be Giants album "Apollo 18", tracks 17 to 37).

I don't typically listen to these clips all together, I mostly use them in shuffle mode along with full-length songs, but I'm just reporting a problem.  These short clips can have a problem playing and displaying properly no matter when or how they're played.