MediaMonkey forum

Although Songs-DB 1.4 beta has been tested fairly extensively prior to the beta, there are a few areas that have had limited test coverage. Any feedback regarding the following would be appreciated:
-Ripping copy protected CDs
-Control Songs-DB via multimedia keyboards (see online help for supported commands)
-Testing with the latest version of Winamp 2.x
-Testing with Win9x
-Testing with Win NT
-OS Upgrades from Win9x or Win NT to Win2k or WinXP on a machine with Songs-DB
-Testing with WMA format files
-Testing a database that has songs distributed over several networked machines

I have a home IP-based network of 5 machines, including the file server. Last night I installed the 1.4 beta on my computer which is an Intel-based 2.53 GHz machine with 512 K of DDR ram. Ignoring the obvious positive comments about the program, the one thing that I noticed was how slow the scan, or update of the database was/is as compared to version 1.3. I thought it might be some setting in options, but I didn't notice anything. Also, I consider it could be the result of the first scan and that it's building new indexes, so I ran the scan several times. It's painfully slow!

Other than that, I have only positive things to say about the program and like it so much that I intend to upgrade to the GOLD version once 1.4 comes out of beta.

Great program!

Dave

This could be caused by ID3Lib.dll used for parsing ID3 tags. Could you try to use that version distributed with 1.3 if the speed is the same on your machine then?

You can turn off the option to rescan all information during each scan and then subsequent scans should be much faster (but that's definitely not solution to the problem).

Thanks for your feedback,
Jiri

Jiri,

I copied ID3Lib.dll from my wife's computer and tried it, but there's no difference. I did notice the file version number (3.8.1) is the same in both copies of the program.

To illustrate the difference in versions of the program, I started a scan on my 2.53 GHz machine and 3 minutes later I started one on my wife's 1.2 Celeron. Within a minute her machine had caught mine and was done within two minutes. Mine's been doing it's thing now for over 5 minutes and it's only 50% of the way. All computers have 10/100 lan cards and distance from the server is not an issue.

I've done some further testing since I first posted this message. It appears the "problem" happens when I select Update Track Info From Tags When Re-Adding Files. When this option is left unchecked, the scan process completes in about 1.30, which is a big difference!

Dave

David,

I ran a couple of tests to try to get to the bottom of this--here's what I found for scanning a DB of ~1000 tracks into an empty db (on a low end celeron 500 Mhz, 192 Mb machine running w2k):
Songs-DB 1.3............4m30s
Songs-DB 1.4............4m37s
Songs-DB 1.4 (database compacted beforehand).........4m30s
Songs-DB 1.4 (compacted db + old ID3 library............4m25s

Essentially, the results are all fairly close to one another. This leads me to believe that the results are caused by:
1) The fact that the new version rescans tags by default on subsequent scans, whereas version 1.3 did not (this is configurable in: Tools|Options|Library [x] Update Track info from Tags when re-adding files (the underlying philosophy being that the tags are correct).
2) The fact that the new version also scans playlists
3) The beta builds are debug builds, and consequently run slightly slower

That said, I'd be interested in knowing how many tracks you imported, and whether scan speed slowed down at any particular point (e.g. after 5000 tracks were added).

Rusty

Rusty,

My file server is a PIII @350 MHz and 128Mb ram. WE have 4 other computers atached and reading information from it.

My typical scan of 2700+ songs now takes about 1m30s on my P4 2.53 and aroound 2m on my wife's Celeron 1.2

Dave

fyi, builds 503 and later include functionality that speeds up all scans after the initial lookup (assuming default configuration).

--Rusty