I’m not sure there even is a known explanation for this or if it might just be my 360 that is a bit silly but here goes.
If I put some mp3s on my flash drive to listen to whilst I am playing a game it takes the 360 sooooo long to read the files on the drive and start playing. Even asking it to list the contents of the folder (maybe 10 mp3s) takes around 30 seconds. This happens when I am in-game and when I am sat on the dashboard. My 360 is fully up to date.
What’s going on here, is it just my 360 or is there some reason it struggles to read data through the USB port?
No real clue, but if it’s mp3s, they probably have to be decoded. If their codec is slow, then it takes a long time to play. Do .wavs play slow too? How about other media types like videos and such?
First guess? Your flash drive has slow read speeds. Not all flash media is created equal. If you can, try a different one and see if it makes a difference.
It’s also possible reformatting the flash drive could help, but I hesitate to recommend that without knowing how comfortable you are with doing that sort of thing.
Finally, the players built into the 360 are not all that speedy themselves. The 30 secs just to list songs seems really long, that’s why I suggest the drive being the culprit, but even accessing media files across a network on the 360 has more lag than it really should.
The flash drive is fine, I use it a lot for work so got an expensive one with fast read/write speeds. I have also tried a different drive with the same results. When I try to play music it lists the folders straight away but once you go into a folder to list the tracks within it hangs for ages before listing, then hangs again when you try to play a track.
It seems to be a 360 problem as I have seen other threads complaining of the same issue elsewhere on the internet. The best guess is that it is down to the size of the drive, small drives list tracks quickly whereas larger drives take a long time regardless of how full they are, this would make sense as my flash drive is 32GB.
My guess is that Microsoft did it intentionally, along with the size and drive number limit. What I mean is, since they want to sell their ridiculously expensive hard drives, they have little reason to optimize the file listing on larger memory drives.
They could also be taking a page from Apple, and plan on “improving” this feature later, and just rolled this to get the feature out there.
This is speculation, but it looks like you might not be getting a GQ answer anyway.
They may be governing the processor cycles consumed by the MP3 element of the system in order to avoid causing either the system processes or the game’s engine to slow down excessively.