Increasing Song Limit

[Tartarus6]

There's a few things limiting the number of songs that the player can handle.

As far as I know:

1. lag - having album images with less pixels can increase the number of songs that can be handled (I think)
2. hard cap - a user on headfi has made custom hiby firmware before to change the hard cap of number of songs that can be indexed (needs fact check) above 50000

we should figure out what snoopy112 did and see if we can implement it to remove any hard caps

additionally, since we already have some desktop tools, we could make something to shrink album arts to improve performance

I personally have no need for a higher song limit, I've only got a couple hundred songs on mine at the moment, but this seems to be a common request on the hiby reddit and on forums like headfi.

@noisetta what do you think?

[noisetta]

Hey, so:

On the album art side — I found that 360×360px is the optimal size for the R3 Pro II display area. Anything larger is just wasted memory and processing time. This hasn't been formally documented yet but it's worth adding to the docs and potentially integrating into the PC Database Updater workflow so art gets resized automatically when scanning.

On the hard cap — worth investigating. If snoopy112 changed it via firmware modification it's likely a value hardcoded in hiby_player that we could patch similarly to how @Jepl4r patched the Database Manager. The database schema itself uses standard SQLite with INT primary keys so there's no obvious DB-level limit — the cap is almost certainly in the binary.

A few things worth looking into:

1. Find snoopy112's post on Head-Fi and see what they actually changed
2. Use ADB to check what the current limit looks like in the running database
3. Search the hiby_player binary for the value 50000 or similar

@Tartarus6 — given your decompilation work, searching the binary for a hardcoded song count limit might be the most direct path.

Happy to help test anything you find.

[Jepl4r]

For the covers I can add an option to resize them to the database script.

[Jepl4r]

Found out that setting tf_music_db_enable from 0 to 1 inside the config.json supposedly increase the limit from 50.000 to 200.000 tracks. It does not work though. The database never gets created on the SD Card, thus leaving the limit to 50.000

Another thing I found is this. It should be the real limit of the database the binary has.

[noisetta]

The default limit is hardcoded to 50000 and there's a condition that tries to bump it to 200000 — but that condition is tied to the SD card database setup succeeding. Since that never gets created, it always falls back to 50000. So tf_music_db_enable isn't broken exactly, it just depends on functionality that doesn't work on this hardware.

There's also a second hardcoded 50000 at piVar2[0x1c] so there are at least two locations in the binary that would need patching.

@Tartarus6 — since you have the decompilation environment set up, could you find the binary offsets for both of those 50000 values in hiby_player? If we can get those we could attempt a direct binary patch to set the limit unconditionally, similar to how the DB Manager patch was done.

[Tartarus6]

@noisetta that looks really promising.
yeah, ill look for the values in the binary