I was hoping to burn some DVD-Rs containing MP3s of my CDs, and keep them at work for listening to during the day. The problem I have is that I get glitches during playback (presumably due to things like seek/latency times in the DVD drive).

Foobar's playback buffering option can be used to prevent glitches in the middle of songs, but this then causes lengthy gaps between songs (as it buffers up the next one). Being one of those sad old fogeys who listens to prog-rock albums from the 1970s, gaps between songs are Not Welcome. And it wouldn't only affect un-hip people like me: it would also be a problem for dance-mix albums, and classical music of course.

It struck me that a straightforward way around this issue would be to use double buffering (or even triple/quadruple buffering if necessary) when reading in the data. It may be that there is already an option like this in Foobar that I've not found, in which case if anyone can point me in the right direction to enable it that would be great. If not, is there an official method for suggesting such an enhancement?

Thanks

Does increasing the output buffer do anything to stop the glitches?

Thanks for the suggestion.

I've tried both extremes of output buffer size as well as the default (ie. 200, 1000 and 8000ms), and the glitches remain. I didn't reboot the PC after changing the buffering, but did restart foobar. Would a reboot be necessary (running Win2K)?

Note: the glitches are occasional, not consistent, which I guess is due to varying CD/DVD drive latency depending on how much seeking is required on any particular data request.

Maybe I should PM foobar's developer: would that be zZzZzZz?

No, a reboot would not be necessary.

Increasing the output buffer size to 8 seconds should get rid of the glitches... if it doesn't, this means that there's something wrong with the system. Could you check if DMA is enabled for the DVD-ROM? Could it be that the dvd-rom and the HDD are sharing the same IDE controller?

(Smacks self in head)....
I should have thought of that (DMA). I don't honestly know if DMA is enabled, and now I'm back at home and can't check until Wednesday. Will let you know what I find. (I do know for sure that the DVD-ROM isn't on the same controller as the hard disk).

Thanks.

Give that man a cigar!
The DVD-ROM drive was in PIO mode. Switched it to DMA, and no glitches so far (after listening for about 15mins).
Thanks, Moneo