Greetings!

I have a few wishes to make for a 3.0 release. Most have already been said before and wished for by people here, but I thought it would be a good time to mention them again... Just in case...

a) The ability for the player application to use more than the default (hard coded) memory amounts, up to a full 64MB.
b) Modification of the default size of the swap partition to accomodate swapping more RAM.
c) Expansion of the scratch partition handling to include FID numbers way beyond the current limit.
d) Updated builder software with enhanced partition sizing and no known builder bugs.
e) Modify the sync so that uploading playlists (not tunes) is not governed by a hard coded maximum (memory or datatype) and crashes if you try to upload too many playlists at the same time.

Well, Item (d) is completely under our control, as it is all known and non-proprietary in implementation. Any one of a dozen or so BBS denizens could do that one, so less pressure on Cambridge there. Ditto for item (b).

I also wonder about (c), if there's a hardcoded limit in the player software (other than 0xffff), or if it's just a matter again of having builder-like software make a bigger scratch partition?

Cheers!

Greetings!

Valid point about the partition sizing controls being publicly available. I forgot that it is not as much the builder kernel as much as the switches you feed into laying out the partitions in the first place.

In the early days (waaaay back when), disk space was more at a premium, so there was a need to minimize scratch and swap partition sizes. Now with 100GB drives near enough to be tempting *, combined with greater accessibility and acceptance of MP3 (and OGG and FLAC) technology, larger databases are much more common.

I do not think that it is a hardcoded limit in the player software as such. I am able to use the player with FIDs far higher than what was expected normally. The player app does not appear to complain (but I have never really tested while watching console out... hmmm...) and keeps going happily. Emplode crashes, but I am able to rebuild the database by running the player app from command line while the filesystems are read/write.

So, I suspect that emplode has an error checking condition and crashes. The player does not, and happily does the "right thing". I am sure that some error or problem is being generated, but I have not found it yet.

* - Disk size. 100GB. There was a thread about this somewhere where I said that I might wait. That is no longer the case. I have been through a major music acquisition phase, and I find that I need the 100GB drives as soon as possible. To quote Tom Lehrer - "More! More! I'm still not satisfied!"

Great post Paul.

It's not going to be long before you have a terrabyte in total between all your players!

You can never have too much space...

There is something to be said about hardware redundancy!

b) Modification of the default size of the swap partition to accomodate swapping more RAM.

This isn't Sobloodylaris, you know. There's no need to increase swap just because you've increased RAM, unless of course you haven't increased RAM enough for what you're trying to do.

Peter

Valid point. I am used to the Solaris world. Still, you can never have too much space...

It doesn't work that way in Solaris, either.

My wish for v3alpha8 is simply that they'd release it publicly

So, can anyone tell me; do I need to head over to Maplins to buy a mic in either:
a) The next week
b) The next 2 weeks
c) The next month
d) The next 3 months

[I'm not even putting an option e) in there for fear of tempting fate!]

The next two weeks, most likely.

Cheers

Woo Hoo!!

/me waits impatiently, twiddling his thumbs...

Is ver3 much better then ver2? Ive never tried 3 cause 1) I have no klue where to find it, and 2) its alpha and dont want to deal with things messing up when im listening to tunes plus I havent even gotten all the things ver2 can do down yet. too much stuff

Version 3 has additional features, but it's not nearly as stable as version 2 yet. If you don't want things messing up, definitely stick with version 2.

My V3 Wish list

A Back Button (let me explain)



My music is sorted like this




Top level
HQ, LQ, Favorites and Bad Mood

Under each of these categories I have Rock, Rap, Humor, Country, Classic Rock, Hip-Hop, and sound tracks under each of those categories it is sorted by artist then album.

I would love to have a back key i.e. I have drilled down to HQ, Rock, Eagles, Hotel California and I listen to what I want I then decide to back track and listen to eagles greatness hits. With 14000 tracks in over 500 different play lists it takes forever to re-drill back to Eagles and if it is Kid Rock its an even Bigger PITA.

I would also like to see a “Skip to next Play list” button
I am be-bopping down the road listening to salt and Pepa Black’s magic and I want to listen to Hot cool and vivacious I nice skip button would rock.

Both of these features exist (more or less) in version 2.0.

Your "Back" button is described here.

Your skip to next playlist button is here.