Patent ID: 7457915

Claim:
A portable media device comprising: a disk memory to locally store media desired for playback by a user; a cache memory; a processor coupled to the disk memory and the cache memory; and a media caching program executable on the processor to adopt different caching policies in caching media items stored in the disk memory depending upon a determination by the portable media device in response to a user input indicative of whether the user is likely to be interacting with the portable media device, wherein: the portable media device comprises a first state where the portable media device determines that the user is likely to be interacting with the portable media device and a second state where the portable media device determines that the user is unlikely to be interacting with the portable device; and the media caching program caches portions of multiple media files in the cache memory if the portable media device determines that it is at the first state and caches as much of contiguous data from at least one media file in the cache memory as possible if the portable media device determines that it is at the second state.