Rockbox Technical Forums

Rockbox General => Rockbox General Discussion => Topic started by: karltpb on August 22, 2008, 08:40:13 AM

Title: Excessive disk access on iPod 5.5G
Post by: karltpb on August 22, 2008, 08:40:13 AM

Hi, I noticed the disk on iPod 5.5G is accessed once in a while during playback even after my music has been buffered. Most of the time it happens whenever a new track starts playing. I presume it reads tag info from the disk (and maybe album art too). As far as I know, metadata-on-buffer was written exactly to prevent that. Could anybody elaborate on this?

I know it does not really matter, but it would provide a little boost to battery life if it didn't happen in first place. So is it just me or is it there by design? If it's the latter then there's definitely some room for improvement. In my opinion, the tag cache should be loaded right into the memory on buffer (and album art too, if not already).

I figured I'd mention that before 3.0 goes gold. I'm willing to file a bug report, but wanted to first make sure I'm not doing anything wrong.

EDIT: I forgot to mention earlier that I'm using r18249 which a couple of days old.

~ Karl.

Title: Re: Excessive disk access on iPod 5.5G
Post by: Llorean on August 22, 2008, 09:20:30 AM

We can't know if you're doing anything wrong without some information like what settings you've changed. It shouldn't need to hit the disk except when it rebuffers.

Title: Re: Excessive disk access on iPod 5.5G
Post by: ryran on August 22, 2008, 09:33:56 AM

Unless you're using a larger-than-average font and/or many of of your tracks have special characters in them. THEN it could just be swapping characters in/out of the font buffer. I experience this, in just the manner you describe, with the fonts I usually use and a plain SVN build.

You could temporarily give my custom build for the 5g (http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=17338.0) a try, which includes a minor patch to font.h to increase the max_font_size (the buffer). That might illuminate the nature of your problem a little more if the disk accesses cease when using it.

Title: Re: Excessive disk access on iPod 5.5G
Post by: karltpb on August 22, 2008, 10:16:42 AM

Alright I got it sorted out. It took me a while to figure it out but most of the stuff I was playing had corrupted headers possibly due to the program I used to encode it. I ran it through a MP3 repair utility and everything's good now. I guess I learned my lesson. haha

Title: Re: Excessive disk access on iPod 5.5G
Post by: ryran on August 22, 2008, 10:20:21 AM

How.. odd. Well, good to hear!

Title: Re: Excessive disk access on iPod 5.5G
Post by: karltpb on August 22, 2008, 10:42:44 AM

Same here actually, I have no idea how the hell that struck my mind.

Anyway thanks for the help guys.