Faster preview of large non-local files

Hello again! :slight_smile:

When loading non-local files into the Ultramixer 2.1 there’s a delay of up to several seconds before playback starts. This happens when we access files on our main audio server using our office workstations over a Gigabit-LAN. (a 1 hour radioprogram @ 256kbit is about 112MB and takes approx 11 seconds to load before playing, a song takes about 1-2 seconds).

Am I correct that Ultramixer caches the entire file locally before playing it? I can understand that this might be a nessesary precaution to ensure smooth playback when i.e. fast pitching, but could you disable this caching at least for the small preview player in the Filearchive window? Or leave an option in preferences to disable full file caching in the entire program -and just add a warning that this might affect perfomance in some cases? This way our journalists could efficiently preview songs and archieved radioprograms without long delays and without leaving Ultramixer. I think other users accessing files over a LAN / WLAN would also find this useful.

Hello rf_onair,

UltraMixer does not cache the whole song. It just caches a small part of it. I am quite sure what is causing the delay. When you first load a song into UltraMixer this file will be examined for it’s bit rates ID3Tags and espacially for it’s length. In most cases MP3’s are encoded as dynamic bit rates. MP3 does not specify a tag in the ID3-Header that tells us the length of a song. So UltraMixer and any other music application that wants to display the correct song length is forced to run very quickly through all the MP3 frames and has to calculate the song length.

Hopefully, that answers you question.

You might ask, if we could make this faster in order to leave some length and just playing back. Yes, this is possible when we provide a streaming feature like playing back from a shoutcast server. There we need the same functionality.

kind regards
Sl@jaR