Events on song change in Amarok 1.4

[Johannes Niess]

Hi,

I've converted an outdated notebook into a remote controlled amarok player. 
The system disk (with amarok and kde binaries and libs) has just 4 GB and a 
high pitch noise, so I want to keep it spun down. The home directory of the 
executing user (.kde, database, album pictures etc.) and the songs reside on 
a quiet but slow 80 GB USB 1.1 disk. My amarok script uses espeak to announce 
the song just started (without causing disk access on the command line). RAM 
is limited (64 MB) on this box, but 20 MB remain as cache. Swap is off. 

I can't see why I get reading or writing disk access on the system disk on 
each song change, spinning up the noisy drive. Could someone provide a short 
walkthrough down the event chain on a song change (from script to amarok to 
kde libs to loading other libs and to songs on disk?). I can't read the code 
and I don't want to move the whole system to the slow but quiet USB disk.

Thank you very much!

Johannes Nieß

P.S:
Feature Request 1 (for Amarok 2.1): Precaching the next N songs / X MB into 
RAM / RAM disk for playback with disks spun down.
Feature Request 2 (for Amarok 1.4): Support O_DIRECT to keep played songs out 
of disk cache.
Feature Request 3 (for Amarok 1.4): Get urls of all songs on playlist via dcop 
(for script based implementation of feature 1).