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Comment by solraph | Hacker News Reader

Unlikely to happen. I sincerely doubt most headphones would have the memory for that buffer. Sure, it's only a megabyte or two of ram, but your headphones would have to spend valuable battery on keeping that ram active.

From my foray into audio app (quite a while ago, I admit), I imagine application support would be tricky as well.

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Well they can advertise how much memory they have...

RAM uses less power than keeping a radio alive, so I suspect aggressive buffering is a net energy saver.

Reminds me of the old portable CD players that would advertise the capacity of their anti-skip buffers.

Sony Bluetooth headphones, now with 10 seconds g-shock protection!

I remember owning one of the first portable CD players that did not have any anti-skip buffer, at all.

It was a very delicate experience.

There are inexpensive headphones with the entire MP3 player built in, so I doubt a little RAM would make much difference.

Yeah, memory on these devices tends to be pretty tight. The other challenge with buffering ahead so much is that if you do skip, you’ve basically used your energy budget for 0 value. You’d have to make the argument that there’s net savings, but that would only materialize with predictions that are right enough that the savings outweigh the times you lose (e.g. a simplest heuristic would be if the audio stream has been live for 5 seconds without skipping, send the available buffer at faster than realtime).

IIRC, Spotify applies a similar strategy also for deciding which music to already fetch from the servers when listening to a playlist to minimise the gap between pressing next song and actual playback. It seems like it should be exactly the same algorithm for sending it to the headset, with the exception of other sounds like notifications/calls.

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