Problem with playback of a big mp3 file

[ccteo]

Hi,

Basically I have a problem with the playback of a big mp3 file. I like to listen to trance music and there shouldn???t be any gaps between the tracks when you listen to it. The only way to do this is to create a big mp3 file consisting of all the tracks. While playing the mp3 file, I noticed that there is a consistent ???glitch??? (a very short period of time when no music is heard) throughout the playback. The thing is, I only get this when I listen to the big mp3 files that I have. When I listen to the normal files, I don???t get this. This is what I think:

The iPod has a 25 min skip protection. I believe the iPod reads the data of next 8 to 10 songs that it is going to play, store them in a buffer and then reads the buffer for skip free playback. However, for the case of a big mp3 file, there are no 8 to 10 tracks to play since all the tracks are in a single file and the track time is definitely more than 25 min. Therefore there are no data in the buffer for the iPod to playback when the 25 min is up. The ???glitch??? is cause by the iPod reading the next 25 mins of data and storing it into the buffer.

I did not time the exact frequency of the glitch, hence I???m not sure whether it is constant at 25 min interval. But I pretty sure the timing is consistent. I only notice this problem when I update the firmware to version 1.4 for my 1G iPod. This version is suppose to save battery life and maybe it does this by changing the way the data is read and store in the buffer.

Does anyone experience the same problem as me? Is my above assessment about the problem correct? If not, care to enlighten me??

[Senjutsu]

It sounds to me like your assesment is largely correct. The iPod has something like 32M of RAM to buffer the song(s) in before it has to spin up the harddrive again. If a song file were more than 32M in size, than it'd have to spin up and read the next 32M of it.

Unless this process were instantaneous (and it isn't) it'd probably cause an underrun in the stream of audion data headed to the decoder, so you'd hear some sort of silence.