crossfade settings interpretation

[Eric Draven]

Hi!  I'm messing around with the crossfade settings on my Rockbox/H340, and have a handful of questions.  I really like what crossfade does to the listening experience and would like to explore further, but I (woefully) can't seem to understand a few things.  Pardon if I misinterpret the manual (or fail to understand it clearly) but here goes:

1.  I can't seem to wrap my head around the concept of a song's "fade in/out delay."  If this setting is a specific length of time between the beginning of the fade in/out process and the actual fade in/out, shouldn't this always be set to zero?   I mean, there aren't any perceivable changes to the playback volume until the actual fade in/out starts, is that right?  Is there a better way of describing this, maybe?

2.  Is it maybe possible to not call it "fade in" and "fade out", and just maybe specify a "crossfade overlap" measured in seconds instead?  That way, you have fewer settings to input.  I'm guessing there's a perfectly sensible technical reason for not doing it this way, but I just want to know if it's possible or not.

3.  Why does my H340's playback still go through a crossfade when I skip tracks, even when I select "enable crossfade on shuffle" only?

Either there isn't enough space in the manual devoted to extensively explaining the whole crossfade aspect, or it's just my thick skull I wouldn't mind, though, if it was the latter but please help me by shedding more light on this.   Thanks in advance!

[pabouk]

I completely agree with you.

This problem (1. and 2.) was already discussed in this forum at least in two threads (try to search) but it was not satisfactorily explained why the crossfade settings parameters are so unintuitive and complicated. I see no technical limitation which would not allow implementing your suggestion.

[Febs]

There was a discussion once quite a while ago on IRC about this very issue and I think that the consensus was that there should be a single overlap setting, as you describe.   This issue, as always, is that someone needs to actually do the work.

[Eric Draven]

@pabouk

Glad to hear you agree.  I wasn't able to search on this prior to posting my message because either the server was too busy when I submitted my searches (and kept returning an error) or because we're still suffering from degraded performance after the Dec 26 quake in Taiwan (I'm from the Philippines).  Nevertheless, I'm glad you found the idea intuitive enough.  Thanks!

@Febs

LOL G'day man!  I fully understand what you mean :p If my coding knowledge weren't zip, I'd have a go at it, but that's just how it is appreciate your thoughts!

(edit)
just tried searching now and true enough, a number of topics had discussed this already.  Thanks for the patience, guys!  Sorry for the bother!