General advice on how to optimize rclone for playing music files

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Hi, thanks for the reply.

I am playing the file directly from a rclone mount with a music player. There is no servers or transcoding involved.

I believe the internet connection is sufficient: 30Mb/s down. These are small .mp3 files average around 7MB. I don't suspect that bandwidth is the bottleneck. For example, I just did a test and downloaded a 6mb file using the mount:
cp "/mount/file.mp3 /tmp
In less than 6 seconds I had copied the entire file from the rclone mount locally.

I did not post a specific configuration because I have tried probable 50 variations of setting combinations. Honestly nothing I have tried has made any noticeable difference apart from:

rclone mount
--fast-list
--vfs-cache-mode=full
remote: /path

which would use all the default settings.

The only setting I can adjust that makes a difference is --vfs-cache-mode. If I set it to anything less than full I get shuddering within the first few seconds. Setting it to 'full' fixes the shuddering issue but it does not decrease the time to start playing.

If I could even get the time to play down to 3-4 seconds it would be acceptable for a music player application but 8-10 seconds is longer than the time it takes to download the entire file.

Here are some recent threads I was researching to try to find possible solutions:

I have tried all of the suggestions in those threads. Is there anything more I could post that would help analyze the issue or is it possible that 8-10 seconds is the best performance I can expect for playing a music file from an rclone mount.