Is it reasonable to load an entire song into RAM in a music player written in otherwise highly optimized C code?

I should note: unless I did the math wrong (which is possible!), a 10 minute song in 32-bit 48khz is still less than 256mb of RAM, which is perfectly fine for the target hardware in this case.

Also, loading it all into a buffer would help with smooth and seamless playback.

It's a tradeoff, I guess.

@hexaheximal I guess it depends on the targetted users / device. A phone with 512MB of RAM that someone just wants to play music on as a dedicated music player might not do so well.

@hexaheximal perhaps detecting the amount of free RAM would be a good check before loading it all in.

@hexaheximal mmap! (but even without that, why do you need to load the entire song into a buffer at once?)

@noisytoot tinyalsa seems to not like streaming audio.

however, after trying the full-song buffer approach, it doesn't like that either???

@hexaheximal are you sure it's working at all?

@noisytoot I have no idea 😭️