PM123's System Settings

Remote control
- Pipe name
- Specify the name of the named pipe that is used to control
PM123 remotely. Only one instance of PM123 can listen at a certain pipe
name. The pipe name must start with \PIPE\.
If you want to control different instances remotely at the same time,
they must use different pipe names and therefore different
configuration files. Otherwise the pipe interface of the second
instance will be deactivated.
Streaming audio
- HTTP proxy
- Specify the name or numeric IP address of your HTTP proxy
server here.
- port
- Specify the port of your HTTP proxy server.
- User name
- This is your HTTP authentication name.
- password
- This is your HTTP authentication password.
- Buffer size
- Specifies the read ahead buffer size (useful when playing
across a network or from a streaming source).
You can disable the buffer having chosen the zero size, but it will
dramatically decrease
player performance.
- Fill x% of the buffer
before playing
- Fills the buffer (see above) before playing.
Performance
- Worker threads
- PM123 uses worker threads to decouple I/O operations from the user
interface. More workers can do more tasks in parallel, but this is not
necessarily faster, because of other limited system resources, first of
all the disk I/O. It is recommended to have at least 2 workers and no
more than 5 (in all).
There are two kinds of tasks to perform:
1. dialog tasks and
2. batch tasks.
Dialog tasks do I/O operations where the user is typically waiting for, e.g. loading a playlist that is just opened for editing.
Batch
tasks do I/O operations that are not indispensable to user actions like
fetching the total playing time of a large playlist.
The general
purpose workers can do both kind of tasks, while the dialog workers are
reserved for dialog tasks to keep the user interface always responsive.
It is a good advise to have at least one dialog worker. More than one
dialog worker makes only sense if you often have to deal with network
timeouts or something like that. A second worker will keep PM123
responsive while the first one is trying to perform some task to no
avail.