Wacky playback for tracksequenceWith Engine#2, until stated otherwise, please do not press Next / Prev, or interrupt playing otherwise (e.g. click another track + Play or Stop + Play). The thing is completely wacky for these matters, and if you do so anyway, all will get messed up during that session.
Please note that the awkwardness of this has a good reason, and that's all the "illegal" I have to apply in order to get the sound right.
Anyway, put all you want to play in the Playlist area, maybe click the track you want to start with (default the first), press Play and stay away.
Note the conveniency of saving the Paylist area content into a Playlist stored on disk (fill in a name and use the Save button), just in case the player might stop before you wanted it (which in the demo version is about always
).
Playtime in demo versionThe playing time is 5 minutes + something between 0 and 30 minutes.
If you always have 5 something is wrong or you are very unlucky.
Memory neededPlease keep in mind that the player "officially" needs 2 GB of memory. This is a safe amount, and keeps you away from troubles.
If you do not have this, it can still work, but it is kind of more difficult to understand what is and what is not allowed then. I'll try to sum it up though :
- First of all, this is NOT related to the 64MB thing you often hear about.
- If you have not enough memory (see below), Engine#2 actually cannot cope with that. It will choke, stop, randomly errors. It does *not* use virtual memory.
Engine#1 though, *will* then use virtual memory, and it will swap the track to disk again, and starts heavily reading from there. This implies degration of sound ! - Engine#2 currently has poor memory management. This implies using more and more memory per played track that comes by, and actually it will be kind of coincidence if all goes right when the memory gets full at the loading of a track (but 4 out of 5 times you'll be okay). BUT :
When you don't have the 2GB, you kind of ask for problems. For instance, when you have 512MB and the OS uses 300 of it, there's just over 200MB divided by 2 available for your track. That's 100MB on average, and that is some 9 minutes for one track. - When Doubling is on, the memory useage doubles too, and with the before example your track cannot be larger than 4.5 minutes.
- When the memory is too low, that is, a next track needs to free old memory from the previous track (can happen with Engine#2 only), the larger the currently loading track is, the sooner things go wrong.
You can use TaskManager (rightclick on Taskbar - TaskManager), the Performance tab, to see the currently used memory. Remember, all is about the Physical Memory ("PF useage" at the left). Currently, with Engine#2 and too few memory in general (hence less than 2GB) you'll see it will reach the limit, and stays there, but varies per loaded track.
Using TaskManager will not degrade the sound as far as I can hear.
