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[Agrajag]

Guys, I really need some input on this. I have 1198 song files currently and they are all locally stored on the XBOX in WMA9 Lossless format in one single long-scrolling folder.

This works great on the PC side, where I keep an exact copy going. I have lost too many CD's to CD rot recently so duplication at this point is a comfort thing.

However, XBMC has real trouble dealing with these files as is. It currently takes 20-30 seconds for every listing to come up so every time I read about an album, 30 more seconds, or bounce out of a visualization, 30 more seconds. (with ID3 tag enabled, which is nice for getting around the filename length issue)

Am I going about this entirely wrong? I like them laid out this way because it makes for easy creation of playlists and to see everything available in one spot. Putting everything into folders by artist or album would then take quite a bit to put together any sort of comprehensive playlist.

If XMBC would index the ID3 info, this could be instant.  <

[marker02]

normally, one would use subfolders....
i have alot of mp3s, more than id like to say, and it takes about 20 seconds to load the listing, AND theyre sorted into folders... so once ur collection gets too big, ul have no choice but to turn off reading of tags, or separate them into folders...

Also, isnt using lossless compression getting a little large on the hdd usage?

anyways, im not sure you're going to find any better solution that to create subfolders, and rebuild your playlists.  <

[tslayer]

Umm.. You guys are forgetting about the database XBMC uses.

SCAN your folder.  XBMC will place the music in the database based on the ID3 tags.

And for Scanning, you don't even need to have ID3 tags enabled.  After scanning is done, you can Switch View off of the Songs View and that will then use the database and it will be FAST (immediate display).

You can switch view to Albums, Artist, Genres, etc..

TS
 <

[Agrajag]

I keep seeing that feature and not quite grasping it. <grin> I've done it a few times apparently with no effect but I wasn't doing it to the folder which explains the results.

Excellent news.

As far as WMA 9 Lossless, that's why I went with a 200GB hard drive. It's not even really making a dent yet. On the PC side I get great support with the format as nearly all the top players support it and on the XBOX side I now have a nice backup of my full CD-Audio collection (at least the songs I care about).

I wondered if I was the only one who actually had CD's stop working for no apparent reason until I ran into an article on the little-known problem of CD rot. I then re-checked the bad discs and sure enough, several had literally eroded in spots making it unplayable. Note that I keep all 2,000+ CDs I own either in their original cases stored away or in a CD-multichanger (400 disc) so they really don't get much handling and yet literally dozens of my discs are now no longer playable.

That got my attention FAST. I decided then that I needed a format that would allow for compression to save some space but would also allow me to rebuild the songs if I wanted them. I bought CD's assuming they would last a lifetime. Silly me.

Anyway, TS, of course SCAN worked great once again. If you ever need a place to stay in NJ, give me a hollar. You can hang out and eat our food as long as you just show me how to really make XBMC shine. <grin>

One oddity with 5-18 now. Not sure if scanning did this, but now I can't do any album searches. All pushes of the white button come up with the same album from a previous session and then find nothing.

On that point, any idea what is up with CDDB that it can't find many of my albums (when this is working for me) though I can go on their site and find them with ease? The tag comes up with the right album name.

This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 18 2004, 03:48 AM <

[tslayer]

I'm assuming you mean allmusic.com search and not CDDB right?  CDDB is only for CDs.

Maybe there is a new bug in the allmusic.com parsing or maybe allmusic.com changed the way their search works such that we need to change the parsing again.

I am not sure on this.  You may want to file a bug report at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc.

Thanks for the offer in NJ

Take care,

TS
 <

[Agrajag]

QUOTE

I'm assuming you mean allmusic.com search and not CDDB right? CDDB is only for CDs.

Actually I meant CDDB. I didn't realize you used allmusic.com for album searches. Since CD's are essentially the same thing, I'm not sure why the CD limitation would be an issue.

The reality for me, and maybe it's my age, is that CDDB finds literally every album I throw at it while allmusic.com fails more than half the time.

However, it could be in the way the search is happening. I just tried this on their site. I have an ELO CD set called "Definitive Collection". CDDB finds it right away.

allmusic.com doesn't find it at all but I also notice that when you do a search without touching anything, it uses the album name to search. The list I got back before was a list that matched ARTIST names, not albums. It very much appears as if XBMC is not properly setting the type of search to Album, at least not with WMA files.

Plus now, I still have that problem with 5-18 that it's only finding the same album over and over. Everything is "Sounds of the Seventies: 1975 Take Two"

This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 18 2004, 06:01 PM <

[necrodiety]

QUOTE (tslayer @ May 18 2004, 03:39 AM)

Umm.. You guys are forgetting about the database XBMC uses. SCAN your folder.  XBMC will place the music in the database based on the ID3 tags. And for Scanning, you don't even need to have ID3 tags enabled.  After scanning is done, you can Switch View off of the Songs View and that will then use the database and it will be FAST (immediate display). You can switch view to Albums, Artist, Genres, etc.. TS

Man, that solves all my problems with connecting to music shares over SMB.  It was taking 30 seconds to pull the folder and there were only 20 songs in it...

Thanks for the tip!  <

[NatasCub]

QUOTE (Agrajag @ May 17 2004, 11:58 PM)

I wondered if I was the only one who actually had CD's stop working for no apparent reason until I ran into an article on the little-known problem of CD rot. I then re-checked the bad discs and sure enough, several had literally eroded in spots making it unplayable. Note that I keep all 2,000+ CDs I own either in their original cases stored away or in a CD-multichanger (400 disc) so they really don't get much handling and yet literally dozens of my discs are now no longer playable.

On the topic of archiving your CD collection, I'm a big fan of the FLAC format.  I'm slowly working through the process of encoding all my CDs to FLAC/.cue pairs.  I end up with a pair of files for each album.  Tracking information is stored in the cue file.  This works great using foobar 2000 for playback on my pc.  Support for this format is in XBMP, and is something on the todo list for XBMC as far as I know.  I may look into patching that in myself.  All my music in this format can be put back to CD effortlessly using Nero and the flac input plugin.  It's nice to be able to carry backups in the car instead of my original discs.  As for where I store all my music, well I've got a fairly large file server running RAID 5.  Right now, it's got 3 250gb drives yielding 500gb of space with redundancy.  I'll soon add a 4th drive giving me 750gb of redundant storage space.  Just some food for thought.  If you're seriously concerned about the longevity of your CD collection, this is certainly a solution.  I've already got my CD collection archived in ogg on the file server and let me tell you it's nice navigating your full collection from xbmc.  <

[Agrajag]

QUOTE (NatasCub @ May 18 2004, 07:43 PM)

On the topic of archiving your CD collection, I'm a big fan of the FLAC format.

I looked at FLAC, installed everything and then ran headlong into the problem of limited FLAC support in the major players. WMA9 provided me with all the benefits of FLAC (minus multi-platform support which, a) I don't care about and b ) will come in time if the format becomes popular).

As far as the comfort level, yes, it's great! Now I just need to get a big enough hard drive to store every song of every CD on, then back that up.

Regarding accessing from XBOX, it is pretty wild though at this point the feature set is clearly at an early stage. I'm hoping this matures over the next few months because I'd like to see a lot more capabilities. Playlists are really basic now and several things just don't work well yet but do get better fairly quickly.

My big concern is what will happen when it's time to retire XBMC! There's nothing out there short of spending several grand that can even come close to this and I really don't give a damn about all the limited 100% streaming solutions.

This post has been edited by Agrajag: May 18 2004, 10:36 PM <