v6 browsing music slow

[GTwannabe]

Wow, the media center in v6 is actually useful!

However, I'm having some issues with slow browsing of imported music files. In Music -> Folder View, opening each folder takes way too long (3-4 minutes of spinning Sage logo).

I do have quite a few files (60 gigs), but browsing through folders really shouldn't bog down the SageTV client. Is there a way to speed up browsing?

[Opus4]

How many songs or subfolders are in such a folder?

And, have you increased the number of rows or thumbnails per row for the folder view? (Are there thumbnails for the music?)

I don't think it should take anywhere near that long to enter a folder.

- Andy

[ToxMox]

During my testing of this I had very poor performance and it turned out to be from strange album art file types etc. I ended up making sure all my album art was in jpeg format and got rid of a bunch that had huge bmp album art in them. Also shrunk all my album art down to like 200x200 or something...don't remember exactly. Now perfomance is much much better with my 11,000+ mp3 library.

[GTwannabe]

I have folders for each artist, then subfolders for each album. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. In fact, it will sometimes hang up when scrolling through the list of folders. All my layout settings are the SageTV defaults.

The imported music files reside in a shared folder on a client PC, if that makes any difference.

[Opus4]

BTW: pay more attention to what ToxMox has to say, above, since I never had such speed isusues.

Having the music on a client system might be making a difference. And, check the speed of the music browser on the server's UI as a comparison too.

- Andy

[GTwannabe]

I took ToxMox's suggestion about album art. I deleted all the BMP's, so there are now only small (sub 200x200) JPG's. Will check browse performance when I get home.

[ToxMox]

Hopefully it works out for you. Let us know how it goes.

[GTwannabe]

Well, it now only takes ~1 minute to enter/exit folders... still too slow. I also tried using the Sage interface on the server... same problem.

I do not have any speed issues if I select music via Albums, Artists, Playlists, etc. Only Browse Folders gives me trouble.

[Opus4]

Does this happen on every folder, or just those that have a lot of subfolders?

For a slow folder, how many subfolders or songs does it contain?

Finally, once you are in a folder, does it scroll reasonably well?

ToxMox: is your music on the same system as SageTV, or is it on some network storage?

Edit: I changed my music import dir to be a network location (all my music is duplicated on a couple PCs), but it still only takes about 3 seconds to enter a folder containing the 131 subfolders where all the music is (3150 songs). Accessing each subfolder is then almost immediate. I realize that is probably quite a bit smaller than your music collection.

- Andy

[ToxMox]

My collection is on the same system as SageTV. Perhaps he is using wireless?

[GTwannabe]

I had a few hundred unsorted MP3's in the root directory. Moved them to an "unsorted" folder and performance has improved. The lag is down to 7-10 seconds when going into/out of the artist folders (~160 folders). Everything is on gigabit ethernet, so speed should not be an issue.

Is there a way to disable displaying album art to see if that helps?

[Opus4]

There is no option to disable thumnail display, but you can change it to use only 2 per row. Now that I think about it, that is controlled by the music/num_folder_thumbs property, so I guess you could set the property lower, though I don't think it has been tested at zero.

But, I'm under the impression that large thumbnails should impact scrolling more than the initial folder loading. If you've deleted BMP files (which might not have been used as thumbnails at all if you embedded the album art), I would think that just meant there were fewer files it had to check in the folder to see which ones were music files & the fewer files there were to check, the faster that process would be. Then, moving the unsorted music to subfolders would reduce the number of files to be checked in the main folder.

Your situation may have been an optimization of file placement, especially since the music collection is accessed via your network. The unsorted folder may still be slow to enter.

- Andy