Music stops momentarily, every minute or so

[Fuzzplug Jones]

My H10 sat around with a dead battery for a few months and after finally getting it replaced, I immediately got a new build of Rockbox. That was 11/17, and I updated to yesterday's daily build yesterday, and in both builds I've noticed that Rockbox often acts as though its buffer is unexpectedly emptied. A song will start playing, then it will stop; RB's elapsed time will stop as well, and after a second it will start up again.

I don't remember this happening before, it could be that the hard drive is getting old, but otherwise it works fine. Also, I went into the System Config on RB and set the hard drive spindown to 150s, that has made it almost stop completely. It seems to happen more on the 11/29 build than the 11/17 build. Before now i've never had to set the spindown above 5s.

Is anyone else having a similar problem? I'm thinking hard drive since I imagine this would've been caught immediately by devs.

EDIT: I ignored the warnings and went into "Debug info" and while watching the buffering thread, I noticed two things: First, the "alloc" and "real" are always about 99% full, and "pcm" was really, really low until I increased the disk spindown time to something ridiculous. Still sometimes "pcm" will jerk down and build slowly up, over and over, except the jerks take it further left than it will build back up to the right. When it finally gets down under the word "pcm" that's when it'll stop playing until it builds up again. What I'm noticing though on these recent builds is, it doesn't fill up fast enough and once it gets down there it'll pause every minute or more.

[Fuzzplug Jones]

Solved - well, at least I think it is.

Turns out it's only happening during specific songs/files, so likely it's either damaged files or a damaged drive. Any suggestions on good (preferably free) surface-scan software? I own a copy of SpinRite but I can only imagine the pain in getting an external USB drive to show up in DOS.

[TrueJournals]

Do you notice that it happens in the same format songs? What format are the songs that it happens in? And what bitrate, etc.?

[Fuzzplug Jones]

Almost everything on the unit is V0 VBR MP3 (I'm a bit of a snob but with future compatibility fears) but I have also played WAV files in RB so there's no bandwidth issue.

[TrueJournals]

That's your problem. V0 VBR takes a lot of processing power to decode. WAV files aren't an issue because WAV is unencoded. The music stopping is the decoder needing to decode more of the file, because the processor is so overwhelmed by trying to decode the highly compressed file, and play back sound, etc. at the same time. You can try going to Settings > General Settings > Playback > Anti-Skip Buffer, and putting that to a higher value. Are you trying to do other things with the player when it pauses, or are you just on the WPS, playing music? If so, don't do other things while playing music. Does the WPS you're using have peakmeters? If so, try changing to a different WPS.

Or, you can just re-encode your music to CBR MP3s, or another format.