Max Files on Media Bridge

[dmanning123]

I am using Microsoft Media Player 11 with 135,000 MP3 songs loaded. The player can handle it, but Media Bridge seems to choke on so many songs. It takes an incredible amount of time (hours) to cache the list and is taking almost 500MB of RAM.

Has any testing been done on such a large library? Are there any recommendations to make it work better?

Thanks!

Dave

[theguywiththefunnyhair]

Hi Dave,

Have you got all 135,000 tracks in your current playlist? This is not really a good idea and its not what a playlist is for. You should create playlists of tunes you actually want to hear, break them up into styles or moods, you may find a listening a more enjoyable experience and NR/MB will respond much better.

If you dont have them in the playlist and its just the library MB is struggling with, please excuse my comments ;)

Cheers

Dan

[dmanning123]

Hi Dan,

No playlists yet. Just the basic ones that come with Media Player. For now, my goal is to simply see a list by Author or Album and be able to play albums. I know I'm killing the memory (I have 3GB, so I should be fine), but I want to make sure there isn't a maximum count set in the code that will kill me.

To date, I haven't been able to get MB to cache the songs. I've given it a few hours, and it is non responsive.

Thanks,

Dave

[Jlee]

I can only echo what Dan said, trying to send your whole library into the currently playing list is not efficient and whilst there's not actual maximum I can't imagine MB was ever designed for that. If you really want to discover how powerful it can be to create your own playlists and smartlists you should consider trying J River Media Centre. It's a bit of a power toy but to get started there are many built in smartlists you can use.

[Mastiff]

Dave, I have a library of 80 000 + tracks managed by J.River Media Center, and MediaBridge has no problems working with that in the regular way. Sending all the tracks to the player still isn't recommende, though...

[theguywiththefunnyhair]

No playlists yet.

Ok. So this may not be a solution for you but i think it would be interesting to see the result, and since your the one with 135,000 tracks.... ;) you could try not putting any of it in your library but creating a file path in MB and pointing it at the directory at the root of all your music.

Another thing i would be quite interested to see, but this may take a little too much effort on your part, would be how your collection is handled by MB using the foobar2000 plugin, i recall Brett mentioning the Library is not managed by MediaBridge when using this plugin.

Cheers

Dan

[dmanning123]

Hi, James River blue screens my system on installation. I tried it on my work laptop and hit the same snag. I'll try some of the other suggestions before trying to troubleshoot the install. Thanks!

[dmanning123]

Dan - File Paths WORKED! Thanks! Awesome! Yippeee! Also, MB is using much less memory and CPU on startup.

I'm not familiar with the foobar2000 plugin. If someone wants to see if it works, I'm happy to try.

Thanks,

Dave

--Dave

[theguywiththefunnyhair]

Hey Dave,

I'd love to see how the foo handles a larger collection, the reason i moved to foobar2000 many years ago was the player i used couldnt handle my collection.

As i said its going to take a bit of effort on your behalf but the end result may be worth it!

Best way to start would be to install foobar and get it working independant of NR, once we have it up we can hook them in together.

So, grab foobar from http://foobar2000.org/foobar2000_0.9.4.1.exe and install to your system. Dont be dissappointed at the way it looks, foobar is like an engine, it comes standard with only what you need to play audio, but like your car if you want you can trick it out to look and feel however you want it to.

Before you start i have to say that its really important that your collection is well tagged to work with foobar and NR, the library is going to read the tags to sort it so bad tags will mean a messy library, and with that many files if its messy its going to be a BIG mess. :)

Once you have foobar installed go to the file menu then preferences and media library, from there add a small (for test purposes) folder of music to the library.

Then let me know and we can move on.

Good Luck

Dan

[dmanning123]

Done. I was able to import my entire collection into foobar. No errors or odd behavior. It took almost no resources to do this, as opposed to MSFT MP, which consumed almost 1GB of RAM for 6 hours.

Dave

[theguywiththefunnyhair]

Thats good news.

Now grab the latestest version of Bretts Foobar2000 plugin from here http://www.promixis.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=3065&d=1163112675 and follow the instructions to install it. Dont use the girder part just yet, it needs a little polishing just put in the required files for MB and F2k.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

If you are using the default ports for MB i think it should just work, otherwise you will need to go to the file menu then preferences>tools>Mediabridge/Girder control and change the communiction settings port.

It may be best to leave everything else on that page as is until you have established a connection with MB and tested the interaction.

Cheers

Dan