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24.4.89.11
In Reply to: Loading entire music file onto RAM before playback posted by zarir on February 23, 2007 at 20:35:54:
There's no way to play music that isn't in RAM, unless the hard drive is hooked up to your sound card or USB chip. Seriously, this is why playback software has RAM buffers (which, in good software, you can set the size of yourself).
Follow Ups:
That's not the issue! Of course everthing is loaded to RAM before
being processed.The key issue is to avoid HD actvitiy/streaming while playing back.
This makes a clear audible improvement and has been prooved on many systems.
There is no way to stop HD activity/streaming because your OS is doing it all the time on its own. If you don't believe me, take a look at your HD activity light even when no music is playing and no programs are running.And now begins a discussion about computer music playback optimization #3231: turn off virtual memory. Oh how glorious my music now sounds! New details are there that were never there before with the evil virtual memory!
Well, it was only a matter of time before Agent Scully showed up and started demanding scientific proof.FYI - You shouldn't make blanket statements like "There is no way to stop HD activity..." -- that's not true.
On my system, after I've booted up and started playing music from my RamDisk, there is absolutely no activity light from my internal HD coming on. For hours. Of course, I have a really streamlined configuration. And I only have Windows and foobar installed - nothing else. If you press CTRL-ALT-DEL (in Windows XP) and bring up the Task Manager and then click on the Processes tab - how many processes do you have running? I only have 17.
17 isn't bad. I think I'm around 24, but some of those are there for a good reason and definitely aren't causing HD activity (e.g. SpeedFan).So you copy hours worth of music to a RAM Disk and then walk away from your computer and let it play while you do something else so as not to cause HD activity? Why are you using a computer for audio playback?!?
***Why are you using a computer for audio playback?!?***Uhh...you do know you're in the Computer Audio Asylum don't you?
I am very skeptical of such statements. They usually are made in a context like this: "I tried copying my music files to a RAM disk for playback. All of a sudden the music sounded so wonderfully open and pure, an amazing level of detail emerged, with a musical texture that sounded more realistic, unlike what I was hearing when playing the files from my hard drive. I hear details in the music that were never there before. Playing back from RAM is the only way to listen to music." Such descriptions are worthless to me. I'm sorry, but such claims seem so utterly illogical that they demand some type of blind test. You might as well be saying something like "music sounds much better when using brand X of computer memory" or "music sounds so much more realistic when I set my screen to 640x480 VGA mode, due to all the interference caused by running my video card in high resolution" or "music sounds so much better when I am using Firefox to browse the internet rather than Internet Explorer." Yes, it's possible that these things are a factor, but the claims are so ridiculous that they simply must be proven via a more scientific method, not the ravings of somebody with way too much time on their hands. You claim they have been proven...please send me a link to your proof.That being said, even if playing back music without any hard drive access sounded better, it would ruin music for me. This is because, in order to play back a song you would have to start streaming it into memory once the previous song finished. This would cause a noticeable delay between songs. Who wants that? I guess you could buffer a whole album to memory before playing it. Maybe in the next version of Foobar2000 this will be an option. :-)
Hi Scrith
I was wanting to load the entire file into RAM rather than have data constantly streaming into RAM. When I tried increasing buffer size on Foobar, I don't know if this achieved what I intended. Which player do you use that allows you to increaseits buffer size on ram? Is this player ASIO compatible?
I use Foobar2000, which allows you to set extremely large buffer sizes.
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