re-reading the whole damn library

[cuddlesducks]

i have a library in excess of 1.5tb. i have used mediamonkey for tagging purposes for ages but have primarily used winamp. unfortunately, for a while winamp's media library has suffered from random crashes whilst loading new files, meaning adding things is a process so tedious as to be not really worth it. so i am trying to switch to mediamonkey. which is great, apart from one thing: obviously i do not want to load the entire library into the now playing list when i wish to play something. however, if by using the track browser i load an album or two into the now playing queue, then go to the now playing node to see what's in the queue, then back to the library again, mediamonkey has apparently wiped its memory of the library it just loaded and needs to "read tracks..." for 15-20 minutes. why does it do this? this makes it near unusable; i cant sit for 15 minutes waiting for the library to re-load every time i want to play something. is mediamonkey simply loading the raw database or is it actually verifying all the file paths still exist? if it's doing the latter, how can i get it to simply do the former? and if it's doing the former, why does it take so long?

hopefully im completely overlooking something simple. i have no folders in the file monitor, by the way.

[Lowlander]

Are you using the My Computer node instead of the Library node to view the tracks?

To disable loading more than selected tracks into Now Playing change the 'Play Now' Action to Play selected tracks only under Tools > Options > Player.

[Donski]

I have to question how much RAM you have in your computer.

I installed MM on a really old laptop running XP with only 256mb of Ram and was experiencing the same problem you have, it would take a long time "Reading Tracks" every time I looked at a different item in the tree node. I upped it to 512mb which is the max for this old Dell and now it takes seconds Reading Tracks when it used to take minutes. It still doesn't work anywhere near as good as my main computer with 4gb of RAM and a far faster CPU, but it was a noticeable improvement.

[cuddlesducks]

lowlander: i'm not using the my computer node, and it's not the now playing node that's giving me the long load time. if through the browser i choose to listen to an album which consists of two mp3s, side a and side b, by double-clicking one, it puts both in the now playing node. i can click on that and see them; thats fine. but when i go back from the now playing node into the main library, i.e. to choose something else, mediamonkey begins to re-scan from scratch the entire library that 30 seconds earlier it had just spent 15 minutes scanning. it's not so much the time it takes to scan it as much as it is there being no reason for it to do so.

donski: i have 1gb ram. i have been thinking of upgrading it anyway for other reasons, so that's an extra incentive i guess. thanks

[Lowlander]

It will need to reread the database to get all the track information, there's way too much information to run from RAM (my database itself is 900MB alone).

That being said 15-20 minutes is way too long. First you might want to start with some optimization by running File > Maintain Library with full optimization enabled. You also want to make sure that the database file itself is not fragmented on your hard drive (I use Defraggler to allow per file defragmentation). Also using the CleanDB addon by Owyn can help fix database inconsistencies that could affect performance: http://sites.google.com/site/owynsmedia ... ts-by-owyn.

If that fails a debug log send to support will help the developers look into what is causing this performance issue on your PC: http://mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=69