CD drive caching

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10-15-2001, 04:57 AM
asteroid

CD drive caching

just playing around with MPXPLAY this week with CD full of MP3s and despite using various different CD drives;

when I have one track playing, when I move to a different directory on the CD to see what track I want to play next the music with jump.

I assume as the CD drive wants to read the FAT table briefly.

I was wondering, is there a program for DOS that will cache the CD drive, by storing the FAT table of the CD in ram and boost the speed in changing different tracks?

John H
10-15-2001, 07:02 AM
SkinnyBoy

There are a number of things that could be causing this, I think...
It could be something to do with the 'refresh' rate of your LCD, this only applies to character screens, or, your processor might be too slow...

I had the same problem on my P75 with a 4X CDrom drive and a 40X4 lcd the problem was the refresh rate thing... :)

If you aren't using am LCD, then, I don't know...
10-15-2001, 08:15 AM
Aaron Cake

You can try to run SmartDrive in DOS and tell it to cache the CDROM drive, but I'm not sure if SmartDrive will let you do this. Try typing smartdrv /? to find out the command line options. There may be an option to cache the FAT only...
10-15-2001, 09:19 AM
asteroid

thanks skinnyboy,

I havent got my LCD yet, the P100 has 16Mb of ram, BTW.
10-16-2001, 01:41 AM
SkinnyBoy

If you don't have an LCD, then I probably can't help you...
Unless you have the LCD enabled and don't actually have one connected???
10-16-2001, 01:58 AM
Fosgate

When you playing the MP3s look at the CPU usage if it anywhere near 90-100% then your computer is just to slow to handle any other processes other then playing MP3s.
Caching might help so give that a try using the technic which Aaron specified
10-16-2001, 02:10 AM
hornet

Also try running mpxplay, with the option to read id3 information on play, not load. using the -ini tag

Quote:

-ini don't preload file informations in playlist (header,id3tag)(load at playing)

It may be that mpxplay is trying to read all the id3 tags in the directory as your browsing, dusrupting the streaming of the mp3 off the cd.

cheers
10-16-2001, 09:26 AM
asteroid

no I have no LCD drivers.

MPXPLAY runs very nicely on the P100 Dell, I am using less than 20% of the speed.

No CD drive in general are just slow, when I have a song player, when I play around changing directories, the CD drive wants to read the FAT table of the disk, interupting playback.

I am pretty sure some kind of caching software would make it run nicer. :)