Slow skipping
 

Hi all, I'm Matthew, nice to meet you.

I bought a "4 gig" nano clone off ebay last week, and it arrived today, I wasn't expecting it to really be 4gb, as there were a few neg feedbacks saying the player was only 2gb, but there were also some withdrawns saying they'd got a refund so I'll be pursuing that line. it was actually pretty good value for a 2gb player I thought at £17 with free shipping, and 2gb is 4 times the capacity of the player I've "grown out of".

I did contact the seller straight after buying, and let himknow that Iwas aware of the whole scam thing and that i'd be testing the player before leaving feedback, and that I'd go through ebay and paypal etc. if it turned out to be hacked. - I hoped that might encourage him to send me a genuine 4gb but evidently not, - unless of course he's getting a bunch of hacked players together with genuine ones from another supplier, and doesn't realise. There were a hell of a lot of glowing feedbacks, and I did contact one recent buyer who assured me that his player was genuine 4gb. tho it was a different style case (makes a difference? they had very similar model numbers and identical specs)

AAAAnyway... ignoring all that, what is really winding me up, is the navigation, it will read files in folders but you don't seem to be able to navigate to a specific folder, I think it does apply some order to how the files appear however, same as my old player.

BUT where as on my old player, I could press the skip button about 50 times in 20 seconds and get into the middle of my tracks, on this, it is sooo damn slow, it takes about 2 - 3 seconds to skip to the next track, then you have to press the button again, extra button presses while it is "skipping" are ignored.

I compress my music to wma vbr q10 - cos it sounds fine on a portable and it doubles the amount of music you can get on it (compared to mp3 128, even more when you consider most of my collection is mp3 192 or even 320 for the stuff i've bought digitally)

so I could cram about 800 tracks on there, but skipping to the track or the album I want will take forever.

Is there any setting I've missed which speeds things up? or is there a better firmware I could flash to it? - is it even possible to modify the firmware the player reports I'm using version 9.1.52

Also does this version support themes? would putting a static image for the boot up sequence speed up turning the thing on? not that that's really a bother I was just curious.

Did anything ever happen with the plan to build a custom or custom hacked firmware for the actions chipset? If so proper folder support and support for m3u/pls playlists would be right at the top of my "features wanted" list.

Thanks for any advice

Ok so file selecting isn't so bad now, I've figured out the whole file browsing / folders thing. Does anyone else think it seems counter intuitive that the play button isn't select though? I keep pressing it by mistake.

One other thought, thinking about how the memory hack works, I assume it must modify the File Allocation Table somehow. I'm wondering if there is anyway to put virtual / link files on the player, (I know you do it in linux but I can't remember what it's called)

Basically meaning you could put a song on once, but have it appear in say a folder called Linkin Park, and also a folder called rock.

So a bit like organising by ID3 but more flexible (if a little long winded)

Edit: it's called a symbolic link

bruffterman , you probably can't get it to work with the symbolic link method you mentioned. These players are quite limited to its own file archiving.

Refering to your earlier post, these players are little "slow" in reaction, and you'll just have to get used to it. As the memory size gets larger (eg 4GB), the reaction time increases. But for a 2GB, it is still relatively acceptable.
I guess the file codec plays a part too, the smaller the file is compressed, the slower it would be for the player to access it.

The firmware you are using is currently not supported by the firmware extraction tool, and is not recommended to be modified in anyway. You'll brick it faster with a wrong firmware flash, than throwing it out of a 10-storey building.

The boot-sequence images are typically a few image files loaded in succession. So you can't modify it to load only 1 static image before the player starts, at least for now.
However, sometime back, another member of the forum reported that by saving 16-bit images rather than 32-bit seems to allow the player to load faster. But this is until the firmware could be safely extracted.