Question on Media Players

eshortie

I noticed today when playing music on my laptop that the hard drive access indicator flashed throughout the songs.

I would assume that to save hard disks spinning and poewr that the music file would be loaded entirly to RAM then played but it seems this is not the case. Or am I wrong.

Just struck me as strange that windows media does this considering the amount of people with laptops nowadays. Never noticed on PC...the indicator light is below and why would I look at it if playing music?

Simple question but just crossed my mind:rolleyes:

keen

The MP3 files are stored on your laptops hard drive, the laptop needs to read from the hard drive in order to play the music files, that's one reason why the indicator light would flash.

RAM needs to communicate with your hard drive in order to store information that your going to use.

eshortie

Ha, I understand that bit

I mean why does it constantly load it bit by bit, why not, the minute you select to play, dump the entire song to RAM if it's availble?

CCSL

As a full song can be very large depending on the quality most players
" stream " the song off the disk only reading in enough to not have a lag while playing. Some however give you an option to set what the buffer will be and also once you have played a song once if you have the ram it will play from the cache in memory.

the link between system Ram and the hard disk is called paging where ram contents are swapped to disk in 4k blocks to make room for running programs.

As a rule of thumb more ram=better performance as a disk is measured in mili seconds and ram in nano seconds.