Track preload affects sonics - HELP!!!

[Miska]

On 3/5/2019 at 2:35 AM, Doak said:

Another good reason, if you need any more, to keep a computer out of your music reproduction system. Any decent dedicated digital music streamer will preload at least a whole song before pressing its own little play button. 

 

Well, first of all each "dedicated digital music streamer" is a computer.

 

But usually a very small short-on-resources one. Have you ever looked how much RAM they have on board? Considered how long it would take for them to transfer entire song for example from Tidal server over the internet, or a hires track within a local network? I have tracks that are several gigabytes in size.

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

You can think the whole premise of the OP is ridiculous.

 

The part that you start playback, stop and start again is not entirely. But it depends on the player (different players have different file access strategies), OS and the computer in question, and of course how much interference the computer in question has with the actual analog signal reproduction.

 

Difference is that when you start playback, OS disk cache will start pulling in the data into RAM. You stop and it's still there for a while, then you start again and at least part of the data is pre-cached. However, after couple of seconds of playback the OS would have already pulled the file into disk cache anyway. Assuming you have enough spare unused RAM. So any difference disappears at the point where both playback cases reach the same level of caching. Which is roughly couple of seconds into playback.

 

Data itself is of course always the same, no difference there.

[Miska]

19 minutes ago, Doak said:

Tracks of several GB are certainly an ultra-extreme example.I doubt that I could find more a very small handful in my large collection.

 

Doesn't change anything. In any case it is easy to monitor network activity to those streamers to see what kind of traffic patterns they have.

 

Most streamers run Linux as OS and many use open source MPD as the player software. So you can inspect the source code to see how it works.

 

19 minutes ago, Doak said:

If you are referring to files that have been oversampled to the max and saved for playback, that too is a very specialized situation.

 

No, I'm not.

[Miska]

8 minutes ago, fas42 said:

An exercise I did some time ago was to organise a good media player for my HP laptop. The usual suspects were hopeless - foobar amongst them. Media Monkey turned out right for me - and it was pretty obvious why: watching the resource usage monitor showed how much sharper MM was in not using CPU cycles, and how the access to the drive was done in short spurts - its footprint on the m/c was as little as possible, as a function of time.

 

Never used that one, I only know my own software and how it accesses files. Of course I burn quite a lot of CPU and GPU time for doing upsampling, room correction and such. Usually steady around ~50 - 60%.

 

[Miska]

Wood glue dirt removal works pretty well.

 

My biggest challenge is one warbled vinyl (it was like that when I got it). I've been thinking the solution is to very carefully oven it first. And since it's 12" 45 rpm and I have all the digital capabilities, I'll play it out at 33 rpm and then speed it up to 45 digitally. That'll make the needle have less tracking challenge... Other good ideas are welcome.