XM Station list is rather slow

**DaveB** · 03-15-2006, 02:16 AM

I'm running RR on a mini-ATX system with a 2GHZ Pentium M processor and 1 gig of RAM.

I noticed that scrolling the XM station list is very slow and as songs change it is slow to update, too. My processor at the time is well under 10% utilization.

Is there a technical reason why the station list is slow? I am wondering if perhaps the station list is being constantly written to disk? If so, that's probably not necessary. I'd just as soon see the entire list kept and updated strictly in RAM and forego writing it to disk. Just a thought.

I know the list could be cached but having the current songs that are playing listed and current is a must, in my opinion.

On another topic -- what would be really nice is to have a means of filtering out stations I'm not interested in ever seeing listed. For example, I'd like all of the sports stations to never appear in the station list. I never listen to them. Is that possible to do now or could it be added as a potential future enchancement?

**guino** · 03-15-2006, 10:23 AM

The list is loaded from a cache file on disk, xmcache.ini.. after that, it remains in memory and is only written back to disk when closing RR.

I'm assuming that you're complaining about the time it takes to update the currently VIEWED stations with artist/title information.. well, this is a limitation of the XMD receiver -- should virtually be the same speed on any computer. Also, I should remind you that NO XM RECEIVER in the market (as far as I know) is able to do the same feature -- list artist/title info from stations other than the one currently tuned. As far as software goes, there only a handful of them that can do that.. the way RR updates XM info has been discussed a few times, so you can search for that..

There's no feature to "hide" the channels you don't want to see, BUT, you can make favorites lists, that will show only the channels you select/add to them. The functionality you seem to be looking for (both with listing channels and hide channels), is something you'll find right off the box with FrodoXM -- which you can easily run from RR.

**DaveB** · 03-15-2006, 10:38 AM

Thanks, Guino. You know...I was eating a bowl of serial this morning when I got to thinking that the receiver is hooked to the PC via a serial port. Windows normally defaults serial ports to 9600 baud. I'm going to crank that up to 57,600 or higher and see if that doesn't help with the update speed.

I've never heard of FrodoXM. I'll check into that. Thanks again for the info and suggestion.

**guino** · 03-15-2006, 11:33 AM

RR sets the speed setting automatically when openning communications to the XM receiver.. so changing settings will do you no good. On the BMV2 skin it is normal for the current page of stations to be updated within 2-3 seconds -- this is the speed of the XMD receiver itself. The SIRIUS receiver takes up to 5 minutes to update all stations but then they're always up to date and will scroll with the stations list imediately like browsing a text file on screen.

**tj!2k4** · 03-15-2006, 11:33 AM

Originally Posted by DaveB

You know...I was eating a bowl of serial this morning

**kamikaze2112** · 03-15-2006, 01:57 PM

I can get the artist/track info from the other stations without changing the channel in my frontend. My problem is that it doesn't always get the info for every channel. I'm using VB6 and this class module for controlling the XMD. I found that I could call the getChannelInfo sub and specify the channel i wanted info about. Then I'd wait for the ChannelInfo event to fire, and see if the returned channel number was the same one i asked for, and if so, load the channel number/name/genre/artist/track info into a MSFlexGrid control

If it's not the channel i asked for, it must be the current chanel, which causes the main display to update.

Oh yea, my GF's Skyfi2 can list the current artist/title on stations other than what's currently playing too