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[Chili-Jam]

As much as I like this product I don't like the treatment of thumnails now.
It's really  a bad idea to store the thumbnails away from the library.
They belong to each other.

I'm doing automated backups of my library (including thumbnails) and now things
are more complicated because the thumbnails are now located in a user directory.

I'm not using MC with different user profiles but I do have several accounts on my
computers for work, home office, gaming. Each account likes to listen to MC but now
every account gets its own thumbnails. Now I have them multiple times on my computers
messing up my c:\ drive where I feel they don't belong.

I'd like to have a way to specify a path to the thumbnails for every single library i
have (not just a general path for MC) so i can have a dedicated place which i feel is the
right one and i want to use this path for every user account.

I hope you can add this as an advanced feature before the release of MC 11.

Best regards and thanks for a wonderfull product.

[Matt]

The new approach provides much better performance when a library resides on a slow network or when you connect to media server.

Windows only provides a few "safe" locations for storing files.  Storing at "All Users" instead of "Current User" would make it so thumbnails wouldn't be recreated per account, but then users could see thumbs from other user accounts if they went looking.

I can't think of a good reason to backup thumbs.  If you forget about that, is this less of an issue?

Thanks.

[sapnho]

The new approach is way better when you run the music from a network drive. It is so much faster now. Before it was hardly usable. Bravo Matt&Co!

[Chili-Jam]

I can see that it improves performance in most cases. I don't want to change that.
I just like to have the option to specify a path to my thumbnails for each library.
You can leave the default of storing it in "Current User", just give a new advanced option.
That would be so nice.

I often carry my library on an USB/Firewire -Disc and whenever i plugg this in a new Computer i have to recreate the thumbnails. Which takes about 8 minutes for all my MP3s. Not to talk about all the pictures i have in a seperate library. This is much slower.

Best regards

[Dragyn]

I would have to agree. build the thumbs once.

I just don't do it because the fact it's on C:. Sometimes I do have to reformat and don't want to REDO everything.

[Alex B]

Part 1.

I rebuilt my thumbnails. It took over 30 minutes.

I had "erase orphans on exit" enabled and after restarting MC I had this:

21186 thumbnails (size on disk 164 MB)

My library consists of:
Total amount of library items: 30689
Audio: 26182 - 16563 music files with cover art linked, 9619 without cover art
Video: 275 - 1 video file with cover art linked, 274 video files without cover art
Images: 4088 files
Documents: 150 files
Internet radio station links: 4 addresses
~nodup=[Image File] returns 1138 files (in all media view)

16536 + 275 + 4088 = 20719  (should I have this amount of thumbnails instead of 21186?)

How does the thumbnail math work?

Anyway, it would be nice if MC could avoid making duplicate thumbnails for each album track, but I guess it's easier (and faster?) to build a new thumbnail for each item instead of accessing the thumbnails with internal linking.

My logic would say like this: 1 cover art image file = 1 thumbnail, and that single thumbnail would be used for all album tracks. Images inside tags, video thumbnails and actual images in the library understandably need a thumbnail for each library item.

Using my logic I would have 1138 + 274 + 4088 = 5500 thumbnails


Part 2.

Now I have only 24 thumbnails, because I closed MC when another library was loaded. That library has 24 items.

Surely, it's not going to make using MC faster if the thumbnails need to be constantly rebuilt.


Part 3. (Edit)

Also, MC loses all previous thumbnails if the libraries are loaded back and forth without closing MC.

I found a bug too: The Tiles list style does not show images.

[Alex B]

Any comments?

[bbrip]

I agree to the performance improvements, particulary if you have a streaming client: This only sends the thumbnails accross once and they are then avialable on the client, rather than having to re-load them eversa time you restart the client.  This should stay that way!

However, some strange behaviour still exists as for whatever reasons I dont get the thumbnails to come accross on the client on about 20% of my albums despite the respective coverart definitly being avialable on the Server.  All albums are the same structure, so I just dont get why some thumbs dont get streamed accross to the client.

(see same topic under 11.0.236)

Any advise would be appreciated

[Chili-Jam]

Sorry to bump this again.

But Matt,

is it so difficult to give an option in the Tools\Options Dialog
where you can specify the Thumbnail location similar to the
other locations that can be set there?

I'd really like to have that feature.

[JimH]

There won't be any more changes now until we release 11.0.

[bbrip]

Given the fact that quite some people have issues with thumbnails, I am sure there would be a benefit adding the feature to locate and (if needed) delete the thumbsfile in order to rebuild it.

See my ealier post with thumbissues since version 11.0.236

[Matt]

It's top secret (kidding), but next build you can edit this registry key to change where thumbnails get stored:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JRiver\Media Center 11\Properties\Thumbnails - Base Path

[Fex]

Top secret (pssst!): Great!

Listening to: 'Dirty Little Secret' from 'Afterglow' by 'Sarah McLachlan' on Media Center 11