85 lines
3.5 KiB
Text
85 lines
3.5 KiB
Text
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Playlists on the Rockbox
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1. Demand-loading of Playlist Filenames from Disk
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A playlist is simply a list of track names. These lists can either be
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created dynamically by the user, or they can be predefined and placed
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into a text file with an .m3u extension.
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The 2048 KB of RAM is the reason we need to get this right. If an average
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track name (i.e. \music\cure\disintegration\01-pictures_of_you.mp3)
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is assumed to be 50 characters long, then:
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A playlist of 15 tracks is 15 * 50 ~= 750 bytes
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A playlist of 100 tracks is 100 * 50 ~= 5 kilobytes
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A playlist of 3500 tracks is 3500 * 50 ~= 175 kilobytes
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A playlist of 10000 tracks is 10000 * 50 ~= 1/4 megabyte
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From these figures, it can be seen that for large playlists, storing
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the entire list of track names in memory significantly reduces the
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capacity available to the audio data buffer, which in turn has a negative
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impact on the performance of the system.
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One method of reducing the total memory consumption of a playlist is
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to delay bringing the actual filenames into memory until needed. Instead,
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the playlist text file can be scanned, and an in-memory array constructed
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with one element for each track present in the text file. Progressing
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through the playlist entails getting the appropriate entry from the array,
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and using that to perform a lookup of the corresponding filename entry
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from the playlist text file.
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With this method, and given that an integer on the Rockbox's CPU is 4 bytes:
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A playlist of 15 tracks is 15 * 4 ~= 60 bytes
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A playlist of 100 tracks is 100 * 4 ~= 400 bytes
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A playlist of 3500 tracks is 3500 * 4 ~= 13 kilobytes
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A playlist of 10000 tracks is 10000 * 4 ~= 39 kilobytes
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It is clear that these are substantial savings, albeit at the cost of
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increased complexity and disk i/o. Prefetch strategies could improve
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performance compared to demand-loading a single entry.
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2. Implementation Options
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Keeping the track names in a file on disk is easy enough for a predefined
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m3u playlist, but for dynamically created playlists, where the user
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browses the filesystem and adds tracks or entire directory hierarchies
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at will, we will need to store the playlist track names in a dedicated
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file. This will be called the Anonymous Playlist, the location of which
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can be set by the user, but will default to \anonymous.m3u or somesuch.
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The current contents of the Anonymous Playlist can be named and saved at
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any time.
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The data structure to support playlists would therefore be:
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typedef struct
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{
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char filename[256] ; /* path name of m3u playlist on disk */
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int *indices; /* array of indices into the playlist */
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int index; /* index of current track within playlist */
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} playlist_info_t;
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So far, so good: we read from an existing m3u file, or we create an
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anonymous one. But what do we do if we start with an existing m3u file,
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and then the user wants to dynamically add tracks to it? A few options
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exist:
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a) we disallow playlist modification of existing m3u files, offering
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instead to replace the current playlist with the new one.
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b) we give the user the option of appending the new tracks to the
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existing m3u file.
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c) we copy the contents of the existing m3u playlist to the anonymous one,
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and then append the new tracks to that. If the m3u playlist is large,
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this could be wasteful and potentially time-consuming. However, choosing
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this option would provide the facility to insert or append entire
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existing m3u playlists 'into' one another, a feature missng from the
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commercial firmware.
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