How the buffer works

The music is physically stored in files on the Jukebox's Hard drive, but the songs are played from the Jukebox's RAM. When you start any jukebox the RAM is cleared. Next you select a song that you want to listen to. The Jukebox finds the file that contains that song on the Hard Drive and loads as much of that song as will fit onto the RAM.

E.g. if you have a 3 minute tune that would normally be stored as an MP3 file of 3MB on the Jukebox Hard Drive. If the Jukebox has a 2MB RAM buffer then 2/3rds of the song is loaded into the RAM to start playing. After 30 seconds or so of playing, another 500KB would be loaded onto the RAM (overwriting the start of the tune).

Jogging and other sporty activities send shocks through the box that may cause the music to stop playing. The RAM buffer is almost completely unaffected by the shocks, but the HD element has moving components. Moving components move very differently to their normal range of movements when experiencing extra G - this can be disastrous as a moving arm that tells the Player where to start reading the music file from, for example, ends up on the other side of the Hard Disk in completely the wrong place. If the file is not where the jukebox expects to find it, the jukebox cannot read it

Loading the music from the Hard Drive to the RAM can take only a few seconds to load several songs.

The bigger the RAM buffer, the longer the Jukebox can go without re-loading data (music) from the Hard Drive to the RAM.

The bigger the buffer, the more time the Jukebox has to arrange the next piece of the tune to get from the storage area of the Hard Drive to the playing area of the RAM.

E.g. The Apple iPod has 32 MB of RAM buffer. This translates to about 20 mins of playing time before any further music needs to be loaded from the Hard Drive into the RAM. Thats enough time to get the next lot of tunes set-up before you run out of buffer even if you're jogging and jolting the iPod about through the medium of sport.