Bugzilla – Bug 10308
Playing a few hundred songs takes too long
Last modified: 2009-11-10 11:44:32 UTC
Playing all songs of an artist or album with several hundred songs takes a long time for the first song to start, and Squeezecenter hardly reacts anymore during the loading. Once playing, Squeezecenter becomes very sluggish, changing the volume or skipping the current song on SB Controller for example can take up to a minute to have an impact. I suppose this has to do with database lookups for every song, but this should be optimized somehow. Ideally, I'd like to be able to click "Play all" for my entire collection, adding all songs I have to the current playlist. Winamp and other desktop music player are able to do that easily. Having read about a new DB schema proposed for 7.4, can this contribute to fix this bug? As a quick fix, one could add additional dynamic playlist (similar to play random songs). Currently I can play all songs for a genre randomly, in addition I would like to be able to play all songs of a specific artist or album randomly. This is a general Squeezecenter bug, but on slow hardware (as the ReadyNAS Duo) it hurts the most. In all other aspects, 7.3 is a big improvement over first builds for the ReadyNAS, and it is very useable now, as long as the current playlist is not longer than a few dozen songs.
Andy notes this is going to require a major redesign to fix. We'll add a metric to our automated tests to try to make sure it doesn't get any worse.
With "major redesign", are you referring to speeding up large playlists or to the "quick fix" i proposed? The obvious solution for me as a user is to create additional genres for the (few) artists I own hundreds of songs of, e.g. "artist_johnnycash". That would enable me to play all Johnny Cash songs randomly with the existing SqueezeCenter. So good news is, there is a workaround for my case. However, to make that easier, a second "select artists" option could be added, in the same way the existing functionality with "select genres" for random song mix works - would that really imply a major redesign? I would appreciate to hear your opinion on this.
The "SQL Playlists" essentially fixes this bug, as it allows to play songs by Genre, Artist, Album etc. randomly. Still, accidentally hitting "Play" on a genre with loads of songs basically crashes SqueezeCenter on systems like the readynas, and the only solution is to restart the device. It would be nice if there was a procedure to gracefully handle this problem. One solution I could imagine would be to start a timer and to exit the process which compiles the playlist after e.g. 30 seconds, with a warning to the user that there are not sufficient system ressources to complete and maybe even a pointer to the SQL Playlists plugin.
My smallest playlist is over 2000 tracks. Booting squeezebox server takes forever! I have just started to load my music collection and already have over 40K tracks. I expect to have playlist in the 10,000 track range. You must solve this problem ASAP. Right now I have 3 devices (Transporter, Squeezeboox, boom) that when I reboot the server take ages to connect. The goal is to have all music on-line using the squeezebox sever. THINK HUGE NUMBERS OF TRACKS. By this time next year i expect to have over 100K tracks on-line
*** Bug 7911 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***