CD audio tracks on WinCE

spookypeanut · Post by **spookypeanut** » Tue Aug 05, 2008 9:34 pm

Anyone here played through any games that have CD audio tracks? I'm playing through gob2 atm, and the "audio CD" seeks seem to be really slow: 3-5 seconds each time. This may not seem so much, but when it has to do it at least twice whenever you talk to someone, it can get really annoying... and on a 600MHz device, it shouldn't be that long (I would think?)

I'm using mp3 compression, haven't tried with ogg / flac yet (that's my next plan). Just wanted to see if anyone else had the problem before posting a bug report: it could just be my device is playing up

Lostech · Post by **Lostech** » Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:05 am

I don´t know what device you do have but I think from my experiences with WinCE5 that it is not really optimized for fast file I/O.
Could be also a problem that your CDROM can not read proper the CD (too high jitter or something like that).

spookypeanut · Post by **spookypeanut** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 8:09 am

I've got a PocketLOOX N560, so yes, I do have WM5. Maybe that's the issue. It's strange that it doesn't take that long seeking in other files tho (e.g. just recently I played through COMI on it, and had no issues).
And when I said CD audio tracks, they're ripped to mp3s. And I've played the game through on my desktop machine (admittedly with oggs, but they came from the same wav originally), and I had no issues.
Still haven't managed to test oggs on wince, will get round to it this weekend (hopefully).

Lostech · Post by **Lostech** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 8:30 am

I´ve got also the N560

There is a possibility to speed up things a little bit. Take the "GreateVK & 777-Team" SD driver and use a SDHC card instead of a normal SD card because SDHC cards are faster for I/O. Nice side effect of this driver is that you can use 4GB cards now

But on the other hand I´m still asking myself how you are using the audio CD on the N560? [Edit]Ahh, I see now, MP3s you are using[/Edit]

joostp · Post by **joostp** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 9:15 am

Also, make sure to use CBR mp3s.

spookypeanut · Post by **spookypeanut** » Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:14 pm

joostp wrote:Also, make sure to use CBR mp3s.

Ooooh, a good tip. I can't remember how I compressed them, but it could well have been variable. Time to go back and make sure!

And thanks to Lostech, I didn't know about the SDHC driver! Now I have to resist the temptation to replace my 4 x 2GB cards with one 8GB one... or maybe even 16GB...

Thanks for your help guys!

bouvrie · Post by **bouvrie** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 9:02 am

Not sure if this topic is still relevant, but I had a similar issue on the Wii port of ScummVM, also using MP3 tracks stored on SD card. The Ogg format apparently improves the seek time.