I think there are some misconceptions here, I'll try and clear them up. The players HAVE to be connected to a server, it is so deeply ingrained in the system doing otherwise would be completely dumping existing software and starting from scratch.
Of course the hardware can read a file from a USB drive, thats not the problem. The problem is the memory needed for the database. The architecture is designed around a database which contains information about each song which allows searching, sorting etc. In order for that to have any chance of being done in reasonable time parts of that database are kept in memory. As the database gets large the size of that in memory portion exceeds what the touch's memory can support. What I hear is the question, so what do you need the database for? All I want to do is give a file name and play that file" Is this a correct summation? The answer is that currently information about the file that people like having displayed about the song is in the database, such as song name, artist, album etc. If you have no database you either don't display any of that or you have to get it at run time. If you want to have that information at the beginning of play it will take some time to read the file and extract that information. The other option is to start playing the music no matter what and have a blank screen, and while the music is playing search for tags, resize artwork etc. As the information becomes available start populating the screen. Theoretically this could be done in advance if you have a playlist and are going in order, while one track is playing the info for the next is being extracted. Of course if you skip to a different track it takes some time. Now parts of this already exist, if you go into a folder and start to play something that is not in the database it will start scanning the file and add that info into the DB on the fly. Its there as an emergency situation not an optimized primary usage, but it could work if you are willing to wait for it. You can't just not have a database, too many pieces of the software access it. Theoretically I think you COULD have a very small database, with say one song in it to begin with, then use folder access to get to the music you want to play. It would take time to scan the files on the fly to build the database entries for those songs you tell it to play, so there WILL be some lag involved. There are some possible problems I can see with this. As far as I know this scan on the fly still builds the database on the disk. Lets take the scenario of you have rebooted (for whatever reason) and you have it setup so it ignores the database file on the disk, what happens when it scans a file on the fly and tries to write it to disk but it is already there? It may not be a problem, but then again it might. You can get around this problem by reading the database into memory at boot time as is currently done, but then you wind up with the database getting bigger and bigger as you play more and more music, over the years you will get back to the same problem that the in memory version of the database is too big. IF the system can get away with the database entirely in memory and doesn't ever need the disk version then this should not be a problem. The upshot is that it might be possible to build a server that can run without a pre-existing database, it might be easy, it might not. It doesn't exist right now. To implement it with the least amount of rewriting existing code will take some careful thought and implementation. Its not something that is going to happen over night and is not just a simple "bug fix". This is all predicated on large collections (I refuse to give a number right now for what large is, no matter what number I say someone will then scream they have one less song than that and they have problems and call me a liar, I'm not going to live with that). If your collection is not large (whatever that may be) the system should work moderately well, there are many, many people that are having no problems at all with the internal server so its not an issue of it being total junk. If you think your collection is not too large and you still are having major problems there is still a chance they can be resolved. It might take some debugging time though. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=78969 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
