Make album artwork show instantly [#6459]

[dave__stewart]

MediaMonkey is amazing. It's seriously the best music player out there. So much so that I've spent many months going through my massive collection and making sure that all the tags are perfect, multiple genres specified, CUE sheets are available where possible, but most satisfyingly, making sure artwork is correct and downloaded into the physical mp3 files.

However, the one thing that really lets down the whole MM experience is browsing by artwork. It is just painfully slow, and there appears to be no caching, so when you go back to a folder, the loading experience repeats.

My wish for the next (minor or major) version of MediaMonkey is to PLEASE start caching the artwork, or preloading it when the user clicks a branch, and not lazy-loading it only when the user scrolls down the page.

Every other image-browsing app I use (Explorer, iTunes, XNView) does this.

If it's a memory or performance consideration, make it a user-preference. I have 4 GB or RAM, so I won't be worrying about it any time soon. I have so many tabs open in Firefox that it regularly uses up a Gig of RAM, and my system is just fine.

Please, please, please with sugar and £50 notes on top!

Many thanks,
Dave

[nohitter151]

MM does cache the art already.

[lrds]

Then want would explain the 'lazy loading' of Artwork that the OP describes?

[dave__stewart]

> MM does cache the art already.

We must have a different definition of caching then. Do you not get a noticeable delay any time you scroll in album art view, or change the view from one album art type to the other?

I think my idea / request is pretty clear, and I think it's pretty clear what benefits there would be to us users.

I'm really glad I've paid for the software, and I'm glad I'm doing my bit to support it - this really is the only thing that for me needs improving though.

[Lowlander]

No, just tried first time and it loaded fairly quickly and then retried and it was near instantaneous (once in a while an album cover would take less then a second to load from blank to album cover). So I can't say that this doesn't work well for me and that with tracks stored over the network.

[dave__stewart]

OK. Well, that doesn't sound like my experience.

Here's a screen videocapture of what I get: http://www.davestewart.co.uk/files/temp/mediamonkey/

Perhaps you can explain the difference, if this is expected behaviour, or if not, what I need to do to put this right.

FYI, I'm running a quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM, and music on a separate internal SATA drive to my system drive.

Thanks,
Dave

[Lowlander]

Have you checked the Temporary Directory set under Tools > Options > General. Does it contain a folder like MMCache762336682_1 and does it contain the Album Art's of the files you have been viewing recently?

[nohitter151]

OK. Well, that doesn't sound like my experience.

Here's a screen videocapture of what I get: http://www.davestewart.co.uk/files/temp/mediamonkey/

Perhaps you can explain the difference, if this is expected behaviour, or if not, what I need to do to put this right.

FYI, I'm running a quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM, and music on a separate internal SATA drive to my system drive.

Thanks,
Dave

It loads as soon as you stop scrolling. I don't see any delay at all.

[kmenzel]

I think the complaint is that it hasn't loaded before the scrolling occurs? Or that once the scrolling has happened, if the view is changed, it doesn't still have the art loaded already? Thus the "delay" is that it hasn't been loaded already, not that it isn't loading really fast?

[nohitter151]

I think the complaint is that it hasn't loaded before the scrolling occurs? Or that once the scrolling has happened, if the view is changed, it doesn't still have the art loaded already? Thus the "delay" is that it hasn't been loaded already, not that it isn't loading really fast?

I think people would rather have the very slight delay (we're talking about less than seconds) than have MM hold all those images in memory and have MM's memory use skyrocket.

[kmenzel]

I agree... especially those of us with incredibly huge collections... (keeping that kind of information in memory could take gigabytes...)

[Wargazm]

I think the complaint is that it hasn't loaded before the scrolling occurs? Or that once the scrolling has happened, if the view is changed, it doesn't still have the art loaded already? Thus the "delay" is that it hasn't been loaded already, not that it isn't loading really fast?

I think people would rather have the very slight delay (we're talking about less than seconds) than have MM hold all those images in memory and have MM's memory use skyrocket.

It could be smarter about which images it loads. If your MM window shows X album covers, then load the previous X and the next X album covers, for a total of 3X album covers loaded. Those are the most likely images to be needed: as you scroll up or down, the images are already in cache so the behavior the OP is talking about is eliminated.

[DaveStewart]

OK, thanks for the various replies.

Right - regarding the cache directory: I do have that folder, and there are some images in there, but upon going to new folders in MM, no new images appear, as I would expect. Nor, when I delete them, are they replaced when I revisit the same folder. I restarted MM, and still, no new images.

Again, am I missing something?

Now, regarding huge collections, mine is 120GB, which is about 42000 songs, and I'm guestimating 3500 albums. However, I'm never going to display all at once - most likely I'll show a few hundred at the maximum when I click on a genre or location node.

Anyway - if thumbnails are 75K, and MM limited its caching to 100 at a time, that's still under 7.5MB, which is nothing. If I wanted to show 1000 albums, we're only looking at 73MB. Loading some Flash-heavy sites will take up more than that! My Firefox regularly takes up a Gig or so.

And memory wouldn't need to "skyrocket" with an option in preferences to allow the user to limit the amount of memory used by preloading thumbnails. Set it at 10MB to start with, which by my calculations preloads 136 album covers (or less, if the folder is not that full) then when MM detects that you've scrolled near the end of the list, MM disposes of the ones at the start, and instead starts to load in thumbnails at the end. I think @Wargazm mentioned the same thing.

A quick test with XNView of viewing 1000 thumbnails show memory usage increase from 10MB to 66MB, which is in exactly the same ballpark. There's certainly some disk access the first time they load in and are cached, but after that - perfectly smooth! Clicking another folder with no thumbnails, and the memory goes straight back down to 10MB. That's absolutely fine in my book, and I use XNview all the time.

Personally, I find the delay of thumbnails loading in a real usability-killer for album view. I can't quickly skim through my collection and browse for covers. Imagine thumbing through a book to show a friend a picture but the pages waited until you were looking at them before loading the pictures? Not good.

I'm a website developer myself, so I'm not just mouthing off. I also have to deal with memory management, especially with things such as online video galleries. I just want to provide some helpful, constructive and hopefully somewhat informed feedback.

Cheers,
Dave

[Wargazm]

Personally, I find the delay of thumbnails loading in a real usability-killer for album view.

I totally agree.

[DaveStewart]

I know you will always have a lot of feature requests, but I was hoping that there might be a bit more discussion on this one after hopefully illustrating the point about album artwork delay fairly eloquently.

Devs?