Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] feature request - load playlist into memory

[Yelve Yakut <yelve gmx de>]

Thanks for the answer Peter. Even though I also happen to be a user
with "some technical knowledge" I urge you to see features from a
users point of view. So the user story is "I want the possibility to
listen to music with an unplugged music library."

In fact main memory or HDD can be used for that purpose. I just made
up 2 examples:

It could be a "precache N songs" option which could fit well into main
memory (dont forget about swap)
so when loading a playlist it would always load the next N songs into
memory and when most of the preloaded songs are listened it would
again fill up the cache with N songs

Another idea would be a special playlist/folder. Thats a playlist on
the left bar which hold copies of songs on HDD. Here's a use case:
1. I drag and drop my current playlist into that "special folder" on
the left bar.
2. That in turn invokes a copy operation of the original files into a
temporary folder on a local drive (/tmp).
3. I can play that "special folder" like any other playlist
4. closing the application will delete the contents of the local
temporary folder (another reason to use /tmp)


yy

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 12:50, Peter
<rhythmbox-devel maubp freeserve co uk> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 3:53 AM, Yelve Yakut <yelve gmx de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> I hope this mailing list is the proper way of requesting a feature.
>>
>> A few months ago I got myself a netbook and I love it!
>> My media is on an external HDD because it wouldn't fit on my internal drive.
>> Unfortunately some problems arise from that HDD:
>> * notable increase in energy consumption
>> * netbook concept of having a small and portable device is gone with
>> that thing dangling from my pc while I try to move from one place to
>> the other or cook while surfing and reading and listening to music at
>> the same time
>>
>> So if it would be possible for Rhythmbox to load all the media from a
>> selected playlist into memory, I could unplug my drive and still be
>> able to listen to music.
>
> That's an interesting idea. When you say "memory", do you mean
> RAM or the netbook's permement storage (i.e. hard drive, memory
> stick, compact flash, SSD, or whatever)?
>
> If you mean RAM, then you won't be able to cache that much data
> (as a guess, maybe 10 songs?) but that might be enough to allow
> the external HDD to go into power saving mode. Perhaps even
> caching one or two songs would help - I wonder if gstreamer (the
> library RB uses internally) can do this? Caching tracks when
> playing music from a remote network drive would be a similar
> issue - although there the aim would be to avoid stuttering due
> to network latency.
>
> Alternatively, if you mean load selected media onto the netbook's
> own hard drive (or equivalent), then it seems very similar to how
> you would sync to a iPod or other music player.
>
> [I am not an RB developer, just a user with some technical
> knowledge.]
>
> Peter
>