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Author Topic: Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?  (Read 14846 times)

Vocalpoint

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Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?
« on: January 12, 2012, 09:21:17 am »
VS - playing from disk? What's the upside? Is there more overhead on the client machine?

Have never had this on and I am wondering if I should?

Cheers,

VP
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mbagge

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Re: Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2012, 10:32:35 am »
Try.
I think the general idea is to avoid having any disk access while playing, even better having the harddrive to power down.
But running Windows, I have yet to see an idle disc for the time it takes to listen to a song.

For sure you can calculate how long time it takes to read 50Mb of lossless music into RAM, just blink and it is done. My guess is that the overhead here is mostly theoretical.

By the way, I have seen Windows performance graphs in here and they shows clearly that MC doesn't access the disc while playing with this option on. (But Windows does !)
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glynor

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Re: Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?
« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2012, 01:22:59 pm »
Not unless your rig is broken, or you fancy sugar pills.
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Vincent Kars

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Re: Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?
« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2012, 01:58:17 pm »
Quote from: mbagge on January 12, 2012, 10:32:35 am
By the way, I have seen Windows performance graphs in here and they shows clearly that MC doesn't access the disc while playing with this option on. (But Windows does !)

There are a couple of options:
1 – other processes are accessing the HD
2 – What MC loads into memory is written to the page file by Win!

Try this option on a system without a page file.
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locust

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Re: Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?
« Reply #4 on: January 13, 2012, 01:47:48 pm »
Why does this only work for audio, I think it would be beneficial for video as well..

Before the memory was increased probably not but since then there should be plenty to spare for video..
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locust

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Re: Play files from memory instead of disk - is this a beneficial option?
« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2012, 02:00:33 pm »
Sorry for the double post...

I think it would be good if a toggle button was available to switch this on & off, because it isn't a good option to have on when you are sorting through your collection.. Because sometimes I am only quickly clicking on a file and skimming though it to see what it is, and having every track load into memory first kind of slows down the sorting and sifting process..

Or as I've said in posts before it would be nice if you could set the rules of views to include extra options from the default options and or exclude certain ones, behaving just like how we already have the check box to not follow the parent scheme view rules"  (Probably only certain ones i.e. it wouldn't be necessary to allow different views to have different file location options, I think) That way you could have a view specificity for sorting purposes, and when any file is played on it would automatically play with that option turned off
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