Implementation of these issues is not quite as simple as has been
presented here. 

Yes turning off autoscan is trivial. The problem is that the whole
system is built aqround having a database thats different parts of the
system query to get information. If you have no database at all, many
parts of the system are going to literally crash and burn. 

Its NOT just for chosing what song to play, its also for displaying the
name, album, artist, length of song etc. All that information is
contained in the database and the screen display routines all get their
information directly from the database. If you don't have a database all
those functions have to be rewritten. Its not a trivial task. 

Quite a while ago several of us tried to implement a "on the fly" scan,
use the file browse to select a file, then run the scanner on just that
file to populate the database so the rest of the code would run. That
sort of worked but it took some time to start up the scanner and scan
the file before the music started. It could also still crash on
artwork. If you tried to run the scanner in parallel with playing the
file, the music would start right away but data on the screen would
take awhile to show up, but even worse most of the time running the
scanner  in parallel with the playback would crash the touch. 

It sounds like what you want here is a special scanner that just
creates an entry in the data base and puts the file name in the entry
and leaves everything else out. That way it doesn't actually have to
read the file so it could be very fast. 

That would probably not be too hard to implement, but again all you get
on the screen is the file name, no artwork, no album name etc. 

You know whats going to happen if that gets implemented, thousands of
people are going to start screaming "what happened to my artwork", "why
can't I see the artist name", etc. etc.

The easiest way to implement this would be an applet, it implements the
file browser, creates database entries with the filenames and then uses
the existing interface to tell the server to start playing a song,
which now exists in the database so it dosn't crash. 

BUT that means you can't use something like iPeng or the Controller.
Making  this work with all usage models is not trivial either. It would
have to be implemented so the "browse files" interface from remote
applications sees the same thing they are already uesed to, which means
hacking up the server. 

The advantage of doing it as an applet is that it doesn't require
anything from Logitech, it could be a third party development, but that
would only work using the screen on the touch. 

All the above COULD be done, but its not a 10 minute operation, its
going to take some significant work by somebody. 

John S.


-- 
JohnSwenson
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