Primo 1.1 save folder

Hi,

I'm using Primo 1.1 and use the music player through my car radio, which I am quite happy with. But, I have noticed that the save folder contains two files, autosave_audio.m3u.sav and lastlist.m3u.sav that slow down the statup of Primo to about 5 minutes. The first file contains the results of the media scan, i.e. all my MP3 tracks and the second file contains the playlist I was last listening to (which is usually all tracks in shuffle mode). If I remove these files from the save folder and start the program it starts very quickly, so I am presuming they are the culprits. My question is does anyone know how to stop it saving these files ? Or how to delete the files on exit, or on start ?

Regards,
Andy

Hmm
I am wondering this : Primo will search again every time and make new indexfiles for the media it has found (the files you name).
What happens if you open them with a txt editor such as notepad, and delete the Text list (empty the files completely, not delete the files), then save them "read only"?
Just an idea. Possibly Primo will make new files (autosave_audio.m3u(2).sav and lastlist.m3u(2).sav)

But I am sure Fatboyfun can make you a script that does exactly what you want.

Shouldn't be a problem, Check back later...

I use an alternate MP3 player in Primo as an External Program (the native one in included with Primo is not stereo, so I don't much care for it) and thus obviously do not suffer the consequences you describe--no files are scanned from the Save folder.
So that might be another option for you. Both Nitrogen and Navi-player are quite nice.

I have just tried emptying the two files and making them read only and that seems to work OK, so I'm happy for now thanks. Just as a matter of interest it doesn't create any new versions of the files in the save folder at all, it just doesn't save the lists and leaves the files empty, obviously because they are read only, so it's a pretty good solution.

I have tried external players (both Nitrogen and wmplayer) but they didn't work very well, they would play for a while (5-10 mins) and then they would start to be jittery and keep stopping and starting, which I put down to lack of memory on my device (HTC Touch Diamond2), although I tend to have about 115meg free before starting Primo which I thought should be plenty. I tried switching buildings/landmarks and everything else off to free up memory, but still the same happened, hence I went back to the internal player. I am also surprised to hear you say that it is not stereo ! I have a couple of tracks that I remember playing that are quite clearly stereo (pinball wizard - The Who), I thought they sounded stereo through Primo too. I'll have to give it another try.

I know one problem a number of people have had with the internal player is 'clipping', I too had this issue but have resolved it by running all my tracks through MP3GAIN and reducing the levels down to 92dB, which has fixed the clipping completely.

Thanks for your help and comments,
Andy

I can write the script if needed, I had the original Touch Diamond and found that Nitrogen was a great player once you adjusted the cache/buffer settings to about four seconds, and put the process priority up to maximum, then the music plays smoothly even with a satnav application running. I never experienced clipping and i had the sound routed through the car radio.

Hi again,

Thanks for the offer of a script, I won't need one thanks.

I am playing with Nitrogen through external programs now as the sound is noticeably better and have tried the settings you suggest, which seem to work quite well to a point. Whilst navigating the music plays fine until it changes track which doesn't actually happen, it just freezes until I go off the navigation screen, then it changes track, has anyone else experienced this ?

I am wondering if it is because the SD card I have is only class 2 and both the music and maps are being accessed from it simultaneously and it is simply not fast enough ? Would moving the maps to the device memory help ? If so, how would I do this, presumably set the maps folder in the sys.txt ?

Regards,
Andy

I never experienced that problem on my old Touch Diamond, But it had 4GB internal memory instead of a SD card, I also had flashed a custom WM6.5 ROM and lastly i was using iGO 8 as it was a few years ago.

gilesfamily wrote:
Whilst navigating the music plays fine until it changes track which doesn't actually happen, it just freezes until I go off the navigation screen, then it changes track, has anyone else experienced this ?

I am wondering if it is because the SD card I have is only class 2 and [color="red"]both the music and maps are being accessed from it simultaneously[/color] and it is simply not fast enough ? Would moving the maps to the device memory help ? If so, how would I do this, presumably set the maps folder in the sys.txt ?

Regards,
Andy

I have not experienced many true "freezes" with Nitrogen, but I have noticed that once in a while it takes an incredibly long time to switch from one MP3 file to the next. 5 minutes or more in some cases. But I have also noticed that it happens only when certain MP3 files are involved, so I put it down to bad encoding. Once I used Total Audio Converter to combine individual tracks into 'albums' (which also re-encodes the lot of them), the problem totally went away.
[color="red"]You may have a good point there.[/color]
Under [Folders] in sys.txt you could try the 'secondary_root={path}' statement to read your maps from another location, or just move the entire Primo folder to main storage and run it from there if it will fit.

The freezing when changing tracks issue i reckon is down to id3 tag encoding, Tracks with id3 v1 tags don't freeze whereas tracks with id3 v2 do. At the moment on my Omnia 2 i have approx 3300 tracks in my playlist which is set on shuffle. :O

I did not think of that exactly, but you could be right. Usually after 'combining' I also edit the tag with MP3 tag:
[Please Register or Login to download file]
So I might have been automatically solving a problem in advance of knowing that I had it.

That's the same excellent tool i use combined with the last free version of dbpoweramp for conversions.

I tend to re-encode mp3 down to 128Kb/s and tidy up the tag before transferring to my phone, i've noticed that mp3tag saves some tags as v1 and others as v2.

Might depend what was there when you started. Combining seems to strip out any tags, and converting from FLAC, of course, has no tag--so I almost always end up with v2.3 as 'new'.
I've tried all kinds of bitrates. 96 sucks bigtime (unless you like the sound of mush heard through a pillow), and 320 seems a waste for no reason, so I too have mostly settled on 128-192. It's not like a car is a pristine environment for sonic subtleties.

I use 128KB/s mostly for file size reasons and i find anything over 192KB/s is wasted in a noisy van, When i started with MP3's i used 64KB/s @ 22050KHz to cram as much as possible into 64MB

Hi, I've been doing some testing and have found that on my device that it doesn't matter what player I use, it always plays in mon once I go into Primo. That is, that if I am playing music via Nitrogen then it is playing in stereo until I invoke Primo and then it switches mono, which seems odd. So actually using the internal player or external player doesn't seem to be any different, both play in mono. Does anyone else experience this ? I still haven't managed to get Nitrogen to change tracks whilst in the map screen and have ordered a class 10 SD card to see if it's my class 2 card that is too slow, I'll post the results.

Regards,
Andy