Since upgrading to 2.0, I've noticed an audio lag which occurs immediately after bootup. After it boots, I take it off pause, a tiny blip of music plays, then a lag as more buffers, then it plays again.

With the disk diag turned on, it appears that the drive doesn't start writing to the cache until I take it off pause. Seemed like 1.03 never had that lag. After boot, I could take it off pause and there was never a pause to buffer music.

Is there a way to make 2.0 start buffering whatever's current (and whatever's next? doesn't the cache do that?) as soon as it's done booting?

Your behavior description does not happen on my player. I don't think you're describing a bug in 2.0. Your "desired behavior" is in fact the way 2.0 works, as far as I know.

I think there's something strange going on with your player. Do you have a reservecache in your config.ini, or are you loading any third party software at bootup?

There was a lag starting each song. I resolved that by deleting all dynamic data (~5 years old, created in 1.03). I don't think I put a reservecache on yet, though I have 32 meg. I enabled the hard drive monitor to watch for W's and see if it was necessary. Perhaps I will try a moderate reservecache setting.

No 3rd party apps. Soon, though.

I would start asking checking into the possibility that the RAM upgrade is the culprit, rather than some more general bug in 2.0.

If you have installed the version of 2.0 that is designed to take advantage of the extra RAM (was that 2.01 or something?), then the problem might be that it's trying to fill its entire cache, and actually causing the lag you're experiencing.

Others here are more experienced with the tricks necessary to make the RAM upgrade perform properly for them, perhaps they can reply here...

I thought my problems went away by clearing the dynamic data. But when I uploaded 1.7 gig of new tracks (very much a rare occasion), it has come back.

The player lags on the silence at the end of a track. Time doesn't count, UI is frozen, button presses are cached and execute 3-5 seconds later when it's done lagging.

I actually think it's lagging on the silence, not while trying to end one track and load the next. I experienced this today with a "secret track"; a single track which has a long pause of silence between two songs. During this silence, the UI was frozen, etc. I think it was still playing because the time increased every 5 seconds or so (I was driving so couldn't really notice). Then it lagged at the end of the next two tracks.

A bad CD? Or a clear case of a symptom I only occasionally saw. Now I've got a track to test it.

Presumably you *do* have a recent Hijack installed ?

I have Hijack 464, so I guess it's a little old now. I enabled disk monitoring but have seen no W's or excessive spinups or caching. The UI just lags at the end of songs and, in at least one instance, at a dead silence within a song.

I'll test it more carefully for a better view of the symptoms.

If I read that right, are you familiar with this problem?

Maybe.

You mentioned in passing that you "have 32 meg", but you did not state the exact player software version in use.

With v2.01 on your 32MB player, I would expect to see the UI slowdown(Hijack) or stoppage(no Hijack).

With v2.00 on your 32MB player, it will treat it as a 16MB player, and should not have the UI issues.

Adding other third party software (other than Hijack) complicates things beyond that.

Cheers

I find it absolutely fascinating that the lag happened in the silent bit a the middle of a track.

I wonder if it's related to the code that does the visuals? That's the only part of the system (I can think of) which behaves differently when the player is playing silence.

Perhaps if there's no audio data to process, the code for the visuals goes into some kind of race condition, executing small loops really fast and taking over the CPU?

My player suffers this 'lag' as well, about once a week. Typically it occurs just after I pause the player - shut off the vehicle - start the vehicle allowing the player to boot. Then when I un-pause the track I get exactly what you described. A blip of music, a pause, then it resumes and all is well. I'll have to verify this but I seem to recall seeing the battery icon when it happens. Not sure though.

I can't consistently reproduce the behavior and my backup player doesn't seem to do this at all. The backup player is hardly ever used in the vehicle though.

My player started life as 1.03. It's now 2.01 and running Hijack 455 (I know, I need to update.) I have telnetd and rsync installed. No extra memory but I do have a eutronix light kit.

Sorry I don't have any insight as to the cause. But you're not alone.