Jim wrote:
But then you're going to be moaning about a 5-minute startup time as it would need to scan all the folders to put them into a database (kind of like a lite version of the existing rescan).
It takes 15 seconds for a perl script to traverse my 800 folder, 16,000 track music library on Windows XP. (This is without doing DB access, just simply stat'ing each file or folder and printing the name to the screen using perl's File::Find package.)
Why on earth do people think that file/directory access is so lousy under XP?
Folders are only there for people who can't be arsed to sort out their tagging, or for quickly playing new stuff you haven't tagged.
Yes and no. Folders are there, for me, so I can quickly sort by meaningful artist. That is, right now SlimServer lets me browse by artist -- but I get a huge list this way, as every compilation album that has 15 different artists contributes, resulting in an unmanageable list. (In this way SlimServer is no different than iTunes or Winamp; both suffer from exactly the same problem. All the meaningful artist names are swamped by the artists that have 1 track on 1 album.)
My top-level music folder is organized by album, with names like this:
Amerie - Touch (2005) M.I.A. - Arular (2005) VA [Ministry of Sound] - The Annual 2004 (2004)
I have 800 albums in my music library; they are relatively easy to browse this way.
SlimServer gives me a few options, none ideal:
1. Browse by artist: all artists are shown, even those that only have one track on one compilation album. This is unmanageable.
2. Browse by album: No artist names are shown. So I have to remember that Amerie's album is called "Touch". I think of it as an album by Amerie, so I expect to see her name as a memory aid.
3. New Music: This is helpful, and definitely a move in the right direction, but again, no artist names.
Ideally, being able to list "meaningful" artists is what I want, and I have no doubt such a thing is now possible with the DB back end, but so far it hasn't been implemented. In the meantime, browsing my top-level music folder is a pretty fair substitute.
(And in fact because of this I tend not to browse at all in SlimServer, but rather do a "Live Search" for everything. It's fast and works well. But sometimes you just want to browse, you know?)
If your collection is so big that browsing folders slows it all down then do one of two things:
1 - Don't use browse folders, tag all your stuff correctly.
My stuff is all tagged 100% correctly, and SlimServer's DB reflects this. For what I want to be able to do, however, it's not enough.
2 - Seperate your folders into subfolders, e.g. "D:\Music\Beatles - White Album\" could become "D:\Music\B\Beatles\White Album"
Yes, I could do that. But then I lose a few things. For one, when looking at the top level folder in Windows, I can sort by date modified and see which albums I most recently added. For another I can do this with thumbnails turned on and see all the artwork, with sort order either by folder name (which is effectively by artist name given my naming scheme) or by date modified (to show me the most recently added albums on top).
Really, this isn't something that's just some sort of intrinsic problem with Windows XP. We're not talking about 100,000 items in a folder, some sort of bizarre edge case, just 800. It takes less than 1 second for a perl script to read my top level directory contents and just 15 seconds to traverse my entire library and stat every single file and directory entry and print them to the screen.
So rather than urge the
"Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this..." "So don't do that"
approach, I'm going to take Dan's suggestion and visit bugzilla, though only after I check into my "Sort By File" setting to see if perhaps that's playing a role in the incredibly poor music folder browsing performance I, and others, are seeing.
SBB
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