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[mattkhan]

(I seem to remember reading a thread on this before but I can't find it now)

As far as I can tell, audio analysis is single threaded which means it plods through one track at a time. It would be nice if this could automatically scale up to use the hardware available and hence would complete the job more quickly.

[Hendrik]

Background analysis is intentionally low impact. Manual analysis let's you run as many simultaneously as you wish, although you often run into IO limits before saturating your CPU.

[mattkhan]

it would be nice to have an option to let that run with more threads

[RoderickGI]

Can I jump on your coattails here Matt?

I run Audio Analysis on both Audio and Video files as part of Auto Import. Whenever MC has a problem with being able to analyse a file, Audio Analysis pretty much just locks up, continuing to try to complete the analysis. I see this most often when I manually run Auto Import after adding new Video files, either where MC tries to analyse a TV Show that is currently recording, or if a JTV TV recording file set is corrupted for some reason. The JTV corruption issue has been mostly fixed now I think, but Auto Import locking up is still a possible issue.

Basically, by trying to speed up the Audio Analysis process by running Auto Import immediately, MC finds the extra TV shows and tries to analyse them as well, and gets stuck. It is not possible to Close the Auto Import at that point, and it can be left running for days without completing. The only way to get out of the locked process is to kill all MC processes, or just reboot the HTPC.

Well, actually there is something I can do to get the new files I have added analysed so that I can watch them. That is I can manually run Audio Analysis on all recently imported files including TV recordings, and that process will finish quickly, and also recognise corrupt files, or files that just can't be analysed, and skip them. That still leaves Auto Import locked, but it means I can watch the new shows immediately and reboot the HTPC later at a more convenient time.

So, it would be nice if:

A manually initiated Auto Import could be closed using the Close button at any time, even when it is stuck on analysing a file.
A manually initiated Auto Import used the same setting for number of files that can be processed at one time as is used when manually running Audio Analysis. (Basically, when run as part of a manually initiated Auto Import, Audio Analysis shouldn't be considered a background process.)
Audio Analysis, when run as part of a manually initiated Auto Import, detected and skipped problem files in the same way a manually run Audio Analysis does. (It does seem that an automatically initiated Auto Import will skip files that can't be analysed, or else I would see locked background processes more often.)



Usually I don't have to worry about how long Auto Import and the Audio Analysis process it initiates takes to complete, because it happens in the background invisibly. Does the situation above sound familiar Matt, or are you just concerned about the processes taking too long generally? Certainly I have been caught out trying to reboot the HTPC for one reason or another, only to be stopped because MC in running Auto Import. But that is far less often than being stopped because MC is recording something!

[mattkhan]

I don't think I have those problems. My problem is just that I copied over a load of (music) files, they import quickly but then you sit and wait for an indeterminate amount of time for it to complete the analysis. It seemed v slow even going one file at a time tbh. There are 2 usability problems there, one is the time it takes and the other is that the process is basically invisible.

Neither is a major problem tbh, it would just be nice if it could go faster as the amount of cpu required seems v low so it seems unlikely, at least on my machine, that doing more in parallel would have an impact on playback.

[Hendrik]

You could always do a manual analysis if you're actively "waiting" for it to finish. It'll stop the background analysis and lets you fine-tune the settings for your CPU/IO possibilities.