Improving the streaming experience of large personal music libraries to mobile devices

Streaming audio content to mobile devices typically comes with buffering latencies and audio gaps, when switching tracks. We present a solution for personal music libraries, which combines song segment pre-downloading with streaming, in order to give an improved experience to users, as if the whole library is on the mobile device and immediately available. Used along with media transcoding, the solution imposes storage requirement at the client side which is only a fraction of the original music library.