Any way to speed up song loading times? For something going off of a non-mechanical drive, it seems to take a very long time for a song to load, even one with only two tracks. Will kind of make it hard to keep a flow in live situations.
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Yes, that’s true… a 4 parts-song takes forever to open
Here are a few ideas to speedup load times. Who knows if any of them are possible or would be a benefit:
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Combine all tracks into one file.The Aeros stores each channel separately today.
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Tune the block size for reads. Would to love to hear that the Aeros only loads one byte at a time as that’s simple to fix. Depending on the setup, adding a read buffer can really speed things up.
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Treat the song as loaded when only the non-muted tracks in the first part are loaded. Might take overall a bit longer to load, but the wait until you could play would be less. Needs good design to pull off well.
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Cache previously reads blocks. Aeros would need rock solid memory management design. Aeros can provide this memory to a cache and then reclaim it as needed as the song gets bigger. Could also prefetch blocks of “next expected” file(s) opportunistically. Could help if there was a set list feature added to the Aeros. These might help some people, but only as good as how well the caches hit on songs the user wants to open.
FYI, I can quickly read the tracks on my computer. Not a fair fight, but shows what it could do given the right hardware and software. Hoping there are software only improvements possible.
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A buffer would be awesome!
However, i think it’s important to keep separate files on the SD card for each track/part.
Silly for everyone to have slow load times when the split files have no value most of the time for most users.
Perhaps there’s an option to enable this slower mode or an explicit export for those that need this.
Any comment from Singular on this coming?
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@BrennanSingularSound. Is this something that is planned?
I might be off, but I don’t remember it being this slow in earlier versions of the software.
They’ll have to include a free workshop on “Between Song Banter & Jokes” with the Aeros purchase package if loading time doesn’t improve.
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I was just having that very thought. How to keep the audience from getting fidgety between songs 
This issue must slow down the people at SS who test and develop the product? Maybe they only use very short songs?
I wonder how much that matters. Often, I’ll just have a one part/two track song and it takes a ridiculously long time. I can’t even imagine what a full 6x6 with three parts woudl be like.
This is another thing that needs to be addressed in order to make this product something which can be used in a live performance situation. I have a 4 minute 6x6 song with 6 parts and about 15 tracks which takes 94 seconds to load.
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This is not my area of expertise but i believe folks would pay significantly more ($100?) for a device that had a faster CPU, cache, RAM, chip, or whatever combination of elements in Aeros would make it significantly faster.
Loading speed is unlikely to be directly related to cost of parts.
I’d be surprised that fixing this requires a bump in the hardware and price. At worst it’s a redesign of the hardware (one time cost, not per unit built) with minor parts changes.
Hoping it’s purely a software thing. Certainly reading the separate files for each channel and track is slow. Perhaps this was done to make it easier to read the files on the sdcard (optimized for export at the expense of normal use) or perhaps it was to simplify the code (managing a single file as a buffer is slightly more complicated). There are other issues in the Aeros to suggest the file handling was rushed/somewhat simplified (e.g. limited character set in the name of the song/file, limits to the duration of the tracks, sdcard cleanup upon deletion).
My guess is getting the Aeros to a $499 price point would be a big win for sales. Going up to $699 would lose a lot of people. That said, loading speed is a critical feature. Seconds for small songs, perhaps 15 seconds max for large songs? We expect great, not “good enough” at this price point.
Hard to say where this fix is in terms of priority relative to other issues and features
Would be good for Aeros to acknowledge they will try to improve this.
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Kind of unusual they haven’t chimed in on this, yet.
It’s one of those non-functional requirements where you don’t know how much an improvement you can make and how long it will take until you write some (test) code that improves things.
Not being a tech guy i don’t understand the intricacies of such devices so your explanation is helpful. For performance I prefer for people to see me create a piece in real time (as opposed to bringing up an already created piece) so this issue is annoying to me but not so critically important as I know it is for others. I do hope progress can be made on this because a minute and a half between songs i know can be an eternity in certain situations.
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Hi,
This post is a specific suggestion for Singular Sound to consider, me being programmer by profession in Silicon Valley.
- How much CPU is required to load the tracks into memory?
- Are you currently streaming from disk or do you load everything into memory?
- How much CPU is used during playback?
My point is that, you may have enough CPU and IO bandwidth to stream in the background while playing. This would mean that you only need to load a percentage of each track, such that the remaining parts of the tracks will finish loading while the looper is in operation.
I am going to guess that you may be using some open source library that relies on the entire track being loaded into memory which is why you have this load-time problem. If that is true, then you either have a “lot” of memory to handle large tracks, or you are already streaming. If you are already streaming, then this is just simple math to implement a fix - which cloud load a song of any length in almost no time.
Let’s assume that hardware limitations do exist or that the software is written in such a way that streaming would be a major rewrite. There is an obvious work around to avoid having to tell the audience jokes and stories between songs - buy a second Aeros.
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That’s where you start loading the song and do a non looper solo tune while it’s loading 
or maybe a tap dance since we’ve gotten so good at it!