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Large library support
Support for large media libraries really needs improving in Songbird.
It\'s the only thing stopping me adopting Songbird full time.
Editing large amounts of metadata (100+ songs) often causes Songbird to crash, editing data takes a long time when it is successful, sorting takes a long time, the program is slow, sluggish..etc.
It\'s the only thing stopping me adopting Songbird full time.
Editing large amounts of metadata (100+ songs) often causes Songbird to crash, editing data takes a long time when it is successful, sorting takes a long time, the program is slow, sluggish..etc.
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Inappropriate?G'day,
Stability comes with maturity. Metadata writing I'll admit is a bit clunky in some cases still, but it will get better.
There is a known issue with sorting, where it freezes after the first character for the first few searches, but then afterwards it is apparently a lot faster then winamp. They are working on this too. The main thing is that they simply need a spinner, so people know its working, and to do the search in a background thread (as winamp does), so that the interface doesn't freeze up. Some of it seems like dodgy behavior, but some of it is perceived slowdown.
A lot of work is going into making songbird more responsive constantly (POTI have said their sights on 100k libraries actually). If you look back at 1.0, there have been dramatic speed differences and other major enhancements, and 1.2 will get even better. In fact, I have noticed that winamp's latest release actually played catchup on one of songbird's features.
Also, Firefox 3.5 adds enormous Javascript and interface speed enhancements (it uses XUL which is kind of like HTML/JS). As Songbird uses the firefox base, songbird will get crazy-fast suddenly after that work is integrated. Its one of the best things about songbird, Songbird's base is backed by mozilla, and the browser war also benefits Songbird
So, whilst I have noticed the same thing in many areas, be aware that POTI is working on making things better, and when the firefox 3.5 base is added, the speed boost will most likely be quite epic (in one quick push)
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This is one of the best points
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That's true. I just ran SunSpider Javascript Benchmark on my machine.
Firefox 3.1b3 (tracemonkey) vs. Songbird 1.1.2.
2818.0ms +/- 7.5% vs. 4833.6ms +/- 1.6% *1.72x as slow*
So the new Firefox is very much faster, and I think the impact of Javascript on Songbird is much bigger than on Firefox... :)
Is there any roadmap on implementing Tracemonkey to songbird? -
Inappropriate?I'll support this comment and add this: the entire library process is so slow as to render Songbird almost useless with a large library. Elsewhere I've noted that I can't even delete the library. It simply crashes whenever I try to delete tracks.
Start-up is painfully slow, and so, as noted by Andrew, is sorting. I don't ewant to be a whiner or complainer here since I run Vista, Mac *and* Linux on various machines and was hoping that Songbird would make the cut and give me a consistent interface for my large (5 TB) flac library.
However, at this point, at least IME, Songbird is so slow and clumsy that I can;'t usde it on any of the three OS's just yet. I'm praying it gets there eventually.1 Comment Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Hi there,
What media library would you recommend then? Winamp was too inefficent for my large library, it kept choking. & as a pc user I found itunes very painful with many crashes etc -
Inappropriate?I've used J. River Media Center in Windows with occasionally good results - that is, when it works, it's great. However, it, too, has a tendency to be extremely slow when searching for new files.
In the end, the best tool I've found is to organize files well yourself. In my case, I file audio first under "Genre", then by artist, then by files. I do end up with 6 hard discs that need to be searched, but I can easily find things by genre, and then browse for an artist I want to hear. I organize classical files by composer first. My discs are labeled: Rock & Folk/Rock, Blues, Country & Pop, Jazz, Classical and Miscellaneous Genres (celtic, new age, latin, vocal etc et al).
Once I've done that, any player works, whether Winamp or "Play" (on the Mac). The entire library is FLAC, backed up in flac on other discs, and several discs devoted to the libray converted to MP3 files for use with iPods etc.
I was really rooting for Songbird. I hope things get better. I strongly prefer Linux, but there are many obstacles to audio on Linux (at least IME, which admittedly is not very long. I'm far more conversant with Leopard and Vista. -
Inappropriate?I guess with every release the dev team kill the top crashers and in time that means much greater stability....I look forward to it! :)
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Inappropriate?Thanks Vizsla, that sounds good in a really time consuming kind of way ;)
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Inappropriate?Just installed songbird, because I made a test installation on an old XP-computer with a small library - but now after installing it on Vista with approx 160 GB (not 5 Tera, as Viszla1086 mentioned) of music, it crashes when searching the library for i.e. titles or anything else. So, in my opinion it doesn't make sense for me to use it any more... Thought, Songbird can handle more. Does anybody know the roadmap for this issue?
I’m frustrated
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This is one of the best points
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G'day Jack.
There appears to be MANY performance fixes due for 1.2 that might help with this. One problem with 1.1.2 is that it started searching straight after the first character. 1.2 adds a small delay so that you can get 3 or 4 letters in before searching (means it searches a lot quicker). Furthermore, they are working on splitting the searching action from the gui (multithreading) so the gui no longer stalls during a search (but that's still upcoming unfortunately).
Some people's crashes though are sometimes related to something else (like dodgy ID3 tags and stuff). Do you mean full-on crash, or just freeze up? Because I've been testing with 111GB of music and Songbird doesn't crash (but yeah, in 1.1.2 it does freeze up for a few seconds whilst searching). -
Inappropriate?Hi Andrew!
First of all: thx for your fast reply... I'm using Version
and you might be right that there is a mix of ID 2 and ID 3 tags in my collection ;-) And it's also pretty nice to hear that version 1.2 will handle the search a little bit different. BUT: there are two big issues! I'm not talking about a system that hangs for a few seconds - I'm talking about 5 minutes and more. And sorry: other programs don't struggle with a mix of ID-tags!
Second topic is that starting up takes up to 1 minute (I assume that during this time the database is read by songbird to be stored in memory?). My Vista is not overloaded, just the Office-package, Corel Draw and a few minor applications. 3 GB of mem should also be enough, correct? And last but not least there is the theme with the missing rip-functionality....
Sorry to say, but I expect other results from a music player, no matter if open source or you have to pay for.
However: thanks for your feedback!
Jack
I’m amused
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Inappropriate?Just another update.
Most the freezes will stop when Jackson 5 is released. Part of the problem was that all the library stuff was sitting on one thread/chain, so if one part of the chain was slow, it means other parts would stop (like the GUI).
In Jackson 5, however, all the library stuff is separated into a new thread/chain. So it means that when the library is doing stuff, the rest of the GUI will still work as expected (so less freezing).
People wanting to check the progress of this case can from:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show... .
In terms of startup time, not sure how that is going (but seems to be getting improved all the time). Firefox 3.5 codebase will probably help there. In terms of ripping, its due in October :D
Jackson 5 searching apparently will be a bit faster too, but not a developer, so no idea how much.
But yeah, if your system is hanging for 5 mins, I guess there isn't much you can do (maybe you can try tweaking the memory usage: http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Docs/Pow... ).
Might be also worth giving 1.2beta 1 a go too. It does seem faster for many cases.
Andrew
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this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?Sorry to say I've found this topic while I'm in hour 17 of "importing media". I've had "Adding tracks to Library.." (the least informative dialog of any music software, no numbers, no progress indicator, just a meaningless moving bar.) While the core library is 40,000 items, and the add is another 10k, EVERY (I test a lot) other music program can deal with it more quickly than Songbird is (if it ever finishes.) Used the very first release of Songbird only dropped it when it didn't progress quickly enough for me to trust that it was the baseline place to manage my personal library. Wanted to give it another try (and if it worked, support) but it appears to be breaking down at the very first turn.
It was pointed out in this topic that because SB sits on the FF codebase it benefits from the development of that base (one of the reasons I've always been intrigued by it) - that makes it all the more embarrassing that the program is so bog slow in dealing with real music collections. compared to every other music management software.
using the latest build, downloaded 12/12/09
I’m sadly disappointed
CHAMP
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