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Author Topic: Memory player  (Read 2633 times)

Vincent Kars

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Memory player
« on: December 04, 2009, 08:48:07 am »
Recently I tried the memory play option of J River.
I put on the resource monitor first.
Indeed I saw some heavy I/O, the song is loaded into memory.
Then I saw little but steady I/O
Yep, memory full so the song is loaded into the pagefile and then read from the disk!
One should probably free some memory first.
Any suggestions on how to do this?

BTW: this has been done on  4 Gb mem with Win7(32 bits)
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JimH

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2009, 08:51:57 am »
Could you copy your system info from MC Help and paste it here?
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Vincent Kars

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2009, 12:22:01 pm »
Media Center 14.0.106 C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 14\

 Workstation 6.1  (Build 7600)
Intel Core 2 2404 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 2097 MB, Free - 1761 MB

Internet Explorer: 8.0.7600.16385 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82.7600 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.1.7600 / Shell32.dll: 6.1.7600 / wnaspi32.dll: N/A
Ripping /   Drive D:   Mode:Normal  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Digital playback: Yes /  Get cover art: Yes /  Calc replay gain: Yes /  Copy volume: 32767
  Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: No 

Burning /  No burners found.
  Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: No /  Direct decoding: No /  Write CD-Text: No
  Use playback settings: No /

Portable Device Info
  Removed devices:


Interface Plugins:
  last.fm (Active)
  Library Server (Active)
  TiVo Server (Active)
  UPnP Server (Active)
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Vincent Kars

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #3 on: December 04, 2009, 12:29:49 pm »
Link to screenshot resource monitor
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Matt

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #4 on: December 04, 2009, 01:32:17 pm »
Quote from: Vincent Kars on December 04, 2009, 08:48:07 am
Recently I tried the memory play option of J River.
I put on the resource monitor first.
Indeed I saw some heavy I/O, the song is loaded into memory.
Then I saw little but steady I/O
Yep, memory full so the song is loaded into the pagefile and then read from the disk!
One should probably free some memory first.
Any suggestions on how to do this?

BTW: this has been done on  4 Gb mem with Win7(32 bits)

I'm not sure the question.

You should add the column "I/O Read Bytes" to see disk usage.  If you enable memory playback, you'll see it spike when a file starts then flatline.

Of course there will be memory movement during playback.  The data still needs to be delivered to the soundcard.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

Vincent Kars

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2009, 02:32:20 pm »
Quote
You should add the column "I/O Read Bytes" to see disk usage.  If you enable memory playback, you'll see it spike when a file starts then flatline.

What you describe is exactly what happened, so correct behaviour.
What also happened:
- when I start play back, MC 14 probably uses the ‘Free memory, not the ‘stand by’, Free is often very low.
- when the Free Mem is fully used, and this happened a couple of time, you see Disk I/O during play back. You also see hard page faults The process doing this is the Swapfile and it’s rate is roughly equal to normal playback from HD.

Is this clear enough?
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Matt

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #6 on: December 04, 2009, 02:57:17 pm »
Quote from: Vincent Kars on December 04, 2009, 02:32:20 pm
What you describe is exactly what happened, so correct behaviour.
What also happened:
-   when I start play back, MC 14 probably uses the ‘Free memory, not the ‘stand by’, Free on is often very low.
-   When the Free Mem is fully used, and this happened a couple of time, you see Disk I/O during play back. You also see hard page faults The process doing this is the Swapfile and it’s rate is roughly equal to normal playback from HD.

Is this clear enough?

I would think the system should provide memory from the 2+ GB of standby/cached memory on your system before using disk-backed memory at all.

Memory playback does allocate from memory and play from that same memory.

It's up to Windows how it chooses to manage the actual physical (and possibly disk) memory.  OS memory management is a really deep topic, and not one I'm particularly expert about.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

dynobot

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #7 on: December 05, 2009, 07:16:55 pm »
Probably dont want to get too deep into this but Windows does offer "Lock Privileges" that essentially locks out a part of RAM for specific use...

I can think of one "high-end" audio software that uses this....

 
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ninekit

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Re: Memory player
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2009, 08:05:53 pm »
How about disable paging once and for all? Think if the library is single track FLAC then most of the time a redbook CD track shouldn't be bigger than 150MB and possibly shouldn't use up all the free memory.

Another suggestion for possible enhancement, how about decompressing compressed files in the background before loading to memory for playback?
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