PM123's System Settings

Screenshot

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.