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Originally Posted by FrinkTL
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...The memory is allocated and deallocated in a very predictable pattern. At start, it grabs all but 6-9MB of RAM. Then, as each song play is completed, it releases on average about 3MB of memory (varies according to the MP3 file size). It continues this 4 times, until free memory reaches approximately 20MB. With the start of the 5th song, Media Player drops the free memory amount back down to the single digits and begins repeating the same pattern...
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I just thought I'd post that in continued testing running standard (NOT Shuffle) mode, the memory usage was the same as when running in shuffle mode. Interestingly, if I switch play modes while a song is still playing the free memory jumps right back up to approx. 20MB. Then, as soon as the next song starts playing, free memory works its way back down to the single digits before it stops dropping.
It appears that the player is either doing some sort of bizarre - and blatantly unnecessary - song caching or building a playlist in memory.
My conclusion? I doubt it is a playlist. How could a playlist (even for 4 GB of songs - I'm only using 512MB - take up 20MB of memory? A playlist is just a Binary/TEXT file, and that would mean the playlist was 20 MILLION characters long -
for just 5 songs. I just can't believe that even Microsoft could be that bad at math.
That leaves the pre-cache idea. I suppose that it is possible, but just as blatantly unnecessary and pointless. Within 5 seconds of disconnecting the SD card, the player stops, so only caching the next 5 seconds worth music would make any sense. Why would you need to cache more than that anyway (an SD card doesn't skip like a personal CD player might)? Also, 20MB for every (only) 5 songs, seems like a LOT of memory. At approx. 3MB per file (for MP3 @ 96bps), that totals only 15MB; what's the other 5MB for?
It just doesn't make any sense! Any ideas?