Media library speed

chimichanga15 · 18th December 2007, 03:31

It appears there's been some discussion about this before:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=246994
However, I wanted to see if there's been any new progress on this. Also, the previous discussion was based more around doing text searches. My question is about browsing the media library.

My media library is about ~35k songs. I am running Winamp 5.5 on 64bit Windows Vista, 2.21GHz AMD Dual Core with 4GB RAM. I tried this with both a modern skin running (MMD3) as well as a classic skin (Winamp Classic), and got similar results. I am using the Artist\Album Art view mode in my library.

To view my entire library, it takes about about 2 seconds to as much as 5 seconds to do the query (as reported at the bottom of the media library window). When it shows me the library, the left pane on top displays a list of every artist, album count, and track count.

When I click on an artist in the left pane, it loads all of their tracks in. This usually takes about 0.5-1.0 seconds. The right pane on top displays a list of each of that artist's albums and the number of tracks on that album.

When I click on an album in the right pane, it loads all of that album's tracks. This usually takes about 0.5-2.0 seconds.

Here's my question: can Winamp create indices to make these queries faster? For instance, when it shows me that I have 50 tracks by a certain band in the left pane, it shouldn't take a second or even half a second to load the tracks by that band; it should already have an index that points to those 50 songs. It's already found those songs at one point, anyway (namely, about 3 seconds previously). Why not keep track of that information? Likewise, when I click on the album with 12 tracks, it shouldn't take a second or two to find those songs; Winamp already found them when it found the number of tracks on that album.

I understand creating an index like this would take more RAM, but I would gladly sacrifice a couple megabytes of RAM in order to speed things up significantly.

It seems like this would be a relatively easy change to make. However, I don't know exactly how the media library queries are executed, so any other knowledge about this would be useful. Thanks.

urlwolf · 19th December 2007, 07:32

I completely agree with you. Searches in winamp are 2 orders of magnitude slower than in other programs (foobar, Jriver, MusicIP). I have ~36000 songs, and waiting seconds per query is ridiculous.

I thought I was experiencing some bug but I see that my search times are normal.

I'm sure much thought has been put on the library querying, but at the moment it's unusable for largish libraries.

18th December 2007, 03:31	#1
chimichanga15 Junior Member Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: California/Minnesota Posts: 19	Media library speed It appears there's been some discussion about this before: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=246994 However, I wanted to see if there's been any new progress on this. Also, the previous discussion was based more around doing text searches. My question is about browsing the media library. My media library is about ~35k songs. I am running Winamp 5.5 on 64bit Windows Vista, 2.21GHz AMD Dual Core with 4GB RAM. I tried this with both a modern skin running (MMD3) as well as a classic skin (Winamp Classic), and got similar results. I am using the Artist\Album Art view mode in my library. To view my entire library, it takes about about 2 seconds to as much as 5 seconds to do the query (as reported at the bottom of the media library window). When it shows me the library, the left pane on top displays a list of every artist, album count, and track count. When I click on an artist in the left pane, it loads all of their tracks in. This usually takes about 0.5-1.0 seconds. The right pane on top displays a list of each of that artist's albums and the number of tracks on that album. When I click on an album in the right pane, it loads all of that album's tracks. This usually takes about 0.5-2.0 seconds. Here's my question: can Winamp create indices to make these queries faster? For instance, when it shows me that I have 50 tracks by a certain band in the left pane, it shouldn't take a second or even half a second to load the tracks by that band; it should already have an index that points to those 50 songs. It's already found those songs at one point, anyway (namely, about 3 seconds previously). Why not keep track of that information? Likewise, when I click on the album with 12 tracks, it shouldn't take a second or two to find those songs; Winamp already found them when it found the number of tracks on that album. I understand creating an index like this would take more RAM, but I would gladly sacrifice a couple megabytes of RAM in order to speed things up significantly. It seems like this would be a relatively easy change to make. However, I don't know exactly how the media library queries are executed, so any other knowledge about this would be useful. Thanks.

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version Email this Page	Search this Thread: Advanced Search
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode

19th December 2007, 07:32	#2
urlwolf Junior Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Posts: 39	I completely agree with you. Searches in winamp are 2 orders of magnitude slower than in other programs (foobar, Jriver, MusicIP). I have ~36000 songs, and waiting seconds per query is ridiculous. I thought I was experiencing some bug but I see that my search times are normal. I'm sure much thought has been put on the library querying, but at the moment it's unusable for largish libraries.