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[YankeeInLondon]

I have been using the macOS for my work with Media Center so far and I love it's power but it is brutally slow and I have a 14 CPU iMac PRO with 128gb of RAM so I figured maybe the Windows version -- in a VM -- would run faster. Anyway, wanted to make sure from others that using my database across the OS's (with only one media center app running at any given time) would be ok.

[HaWi]

I don't believe the databases themselves work across OS. However, you can export the database to .xml which you should then be able to import from another OS.

[blgentry]

If you make a database backup (file > library > backup) you can restore it into another instance of MC, even across OSes.  (File > Library > Restore).

Note that the paths will be wonky though.  Mac uses slash, while Windows uses backslash.  Not sure how to fix that without what Hans suggested; an XML export and import.

But let's get back to "brutally slow" on your Mac.  Please tell us more about what you experience as slowness.  Also, is your Library (the database, not the media files) on an internal drive?  How big is your library (number of media files) ?

Even my 2011 Macbook Pro works just fine with my library.

Brian.

[YankeeInLondon]

My database is on a local SSD to the iMac, it has 18,000 files, 30mb database, and 240mb in thumbnails. The media files -- all audio -- are on a 1GB ethernet connection within my home network. The network is all physically wired so no issue with wireless stuff. Not sure if this would be considered small, medium, or large in relative terms but in terms of user experience, I would say almost ever operation (aka, bring up tag editor, request the dialog for media thumbnails from internet, change from artists to albums, etc.) results in the computer spinning for several seconds and sometimes up to 20-30 seconds. I would be hugely grateful if there was something I could do to speed this up as it is quite painful.

Ken

[RoderickGI]

I think fixing the slowness problem on your iMac is the correct solution.

But if you do need to share a Library between Windows and Mac OSX, then there is now the "Portable Library" functionality. In the menu, "File > Library > Portable Library" you can set up path translations to account for the different paths used on Windows and OSX.

See https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,122099.0.html

[YankeeInLondon]

Does having the media on a SAN cause problems? I'd have thought this would be a reasonably common configuration? Are there any caching settings locally that I can boost to improve things?

[wer]

Having your media files on a NAS is lower performance than having them on a local drive, if the local drive is of reasonable speed. Dramatically lower in some circumstances.  Many people put their media files on a NAS, but the goal is not speed.

Your thumbnails are not actually stored in your library.  You should double-check exactly where you have them stored.

If you have the option "Update tags when file info changes" enabled, then when you edit the metadata in your library, MC will try to write those tags to the media files themselves if appropriate. It can go into disk wait while doing so. It might even have to wait for the drives to spin up, if your NAS has idled them.  That can take many seconds.

If you turn the option off, all writes will be local. However, then your library metadata will be desynchronized with the metadata in the files.  This has downsides as well.

[HaWi]

FWIW, I have my media files on a Synology DS1819+ connected via Ethernet/Switch to my iMac, where I run MC26. The folder containing my media (~20000 audio files) is permanently mounted as an SMB3 share on my iMac. I have "Update tags when file info changes" enabled and do see some performance degradation but totally acceptable. It takes a few seconds to update 20 tracks.
cheers,
Hans

[wer]

Indeed, I didn't mean to imply it's not a workable solution. Lots of people put their files on a NAS, and find the performance totally acceptable. A lot can depend on how the NAS is configured, and what kind of work you're doing.

[YankeeInLondon]

FWIW, I have my media files on a Synology DS1819+ connected via Ethernet/Switch to my iMac

@haWi it appears we have a very similar setup. I have a Synology RS1819 ("plus series" as well). On the off chance this has happened to you I am suddenly not unable to do virtually anything on the Synology as it claims my volume utilization is 100% which makes no sense as I only have a single 10TB volume and it's disk utilization is 44%. CPU and Memory are also very comfortably low. I now have a help desk request in to see how to get my NAS back into a working status.

[YankeeInLondon]

Thanks @wer for the config suggestions ...

Your thumbnails are not actually stored in your library.  You should double-check exactly where you have them stored.

Because my NAS is down I'm a bit afraid to open the app until I fix this but ... is this easy to find in the settings?

If you have the option "Update tags when file info changes" enabled, then when you edit the metadata in your library, MC will try to write those tags to the media files themselves if appropriate. It can go into disk wait while doing so. It might even have to wait for the drives to spin up, if your NAS has idled them.  That can take many seconds.

Where does one find the "Update tags when file info changes" dialog? Also am I right in saying that if this were turned on that it would first write to the database locally (my local hard drive is blazingly fast) and then attempt writing to the files themselves but do this in a "non-blocking" fashion so as to not tie up the user interface?

[wer]

Because my NAS is down I'm a bit afraid to open the app until I fix this but ... is this easy to find in the settings?

It depends what you mean by "thumbnails". If you mean Cover Art for Audio, this is specified in File Locations in options. If you mean video thumbnails, they're in the profile\appdata folder on Windows; I'm not sure where the mac version stores them. You might want to do some research.

Where does one find the "Update tags when file info changes" dialog?

The options dialog has a search function. I suggest you use it.

Also am I right in saying that if this were turned on that it would first write to the database locally (my local hard drive is blazingly fast) and then attempt writing to the files themselves but do this in a "non-blocking" fashion so as to not tie up the user interface?

On the Windows version, the app can freeze when in disk wait.  I don't know if JRiver has implemented asynchronous non-blocking disk I/O in the Mac version.

You might want to consider reading this article:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Network_and_Slow_Storage

If you're afraid to open MC when your NAS is down, you have probably made some bad settings choices.  You might want to consider running with "Run auto-import in background" disabled.  And you definitely need to be very careful about enabling the "Fix broken links" option when configuring auto-import, which can be quite dangerous.  Before you ask where those options are too, you should read this article:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Auto-Import

If your NAS is down, and you left MC configured with auto-import enabled and fix broken links turned on, then you are indeed in a pickle, and will need to get your NAS fixed before running MC.  Or have a good backup.  If you don't know how you had those configured, then to be safe you should not run MC until the storage is back online.

[YankeeInLondon]

Good suggestions @wer and I am not someone who relies on forums typically, I just don't know if there are any implications of starting MC when my network storage is either down or in a bad state (as it reporting 100% utilization when it's no where clear to that ... and it agrees with that assessment too). I do have the auto-import feature on (and without the linking because I was unsure what that was). Notably though I wasn't finding the auto-imports to really work reliably (well maybe never) and so I was doing a lot of explicit importing of folders when I brought in new media.

In either event, thanks for all the links, sounds like based on my config I can probably start the program and look around at my config a little.

[HaWi]

@haWi it appears we have a very similar setup. I have a Synology RS1819 ("plus series" as well). On the off chance this has happened to you I am suddenly not unable to do virtually anything on the Synology as it claims my volume utilization is 100% which makes no sense as I only have a single 10TB volume and it's disk utilization is 44%. CPU and Memory are also very comfortably low. I now have a help desk request in to see how to get my NAS back into a working status.

Is your volume set up as SHR or RAID5 (not sure you can even do that with a single drive) because that would sacrifice half your capacity for redundancy? Do you do snapshot replication?

[YankeeInLondon]

Is your volume set up as SHR or RAID5 (not sure you can even do that with a single drive) because that would sacrifice half your capacity for redundancy? Do you do snapshot replication?

I have 4 physical discs running on RAID-6 (all operating under a single logical volume)

[YankeeInLondon]

So I've now started up the MC app while the NAS is currently down. I'm happy to see that my configuration looks pretty good (from what I've taken away from this conversation) but modal windows continue to pop up in succession that look that attached, all saying:

Media Center encountered errors while tagging or moving files. Check that the files exist, are not read-only, and are not in use by other porgrams.

My guess is that this is because it's been trying for a very long time to write meta-data back to the NAS but was either failing silently or was in a wait mode and being asynchronously queued. I attached a graphic I got from Synology soon before it decided I shouldn't be able to log in anymore.

[HaWi]

I have 4 physical discs running on RAID-6 (all operating under a single logical volume)

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood single drive for single volume. With 4 equally sized drives in RAID6, I believe, you have two drive redundancy and the actual capacity of your array is half the capacity of the sum of all four drives together. I might be wrong, the Synology Support site has a capacity calculator for the different versions of RAID. I have SHR1/RAID5 which is single drive redundancy and my RAID capacity is 75% of the sum of my drives' capacity.

[wer]

With 4 equally sized drives in RAID6, I believe, you have two drive redundancy and the actual capacity of your array is half the capacity of the sum of all four drives together. I might be wrong

That is correct.  RAID-6 has parity redundancy (double parity blocks).

[blgentry]

Thoughts:

Sounds like your NAS isn't healthy and happy right now.  Getting it fixed first is a good step, regardless whether it's the root of the problem or not.   I suspect it has something to do with it.  MacOS doesn't handle "spun down" drives very well.  I have several physical external drives connected to my iMac.  Any time one of my apps does a "drive inventory" operation... like when you open a Save dialog for example... my Mac does the "Spinning beach ball" until every single drive is spun up and working.  This is rather annoying; it can take 45-ish seconds.

If you have your NAS persistently mounted, there might be something similar going on as MC (and other programs) try to access the disk.

Regarding thumbnails versus Cover Art:

Thumbnails are indeed stored WITH THE DATABASE.  That's the thumbnail cache that's used to display your thumbnails in the MC interface.  Now, the Cover Art (full sized) which is used to create those thumbnails... that has a variable location as our man wer has said.  As long as your Library (database) is stored on your SSD, you should be fine from a thumbnails perspective.

However, as was already discussed, the "update tags when file changes" setting is what controls whether or not MC writes back to your Media files.
tools > Options > General > Importing & Tagging > Update tags when file info changes

If that option is checked (which it is by default) MC will write all tag changes to your files.  This includes play count, last played date, etc.  So MC may be writing to your files on every play.  This isn't necessarily any kind of problem.  But it might make MC act weird if your files are not writeable.  For the record I have this setting ON on my copies of MC and always have.

Auto Import is mostly a good feature.  But it has unusual behaviors in unusual situations.  For that reason I have auto import turned off and run it manually by pressing the button that I put into the top toolbar for this purpose.

Good luck with your NAS and MC.

Brian.

[HaWi]

To avoid the delay of spinning up the drives I have set my Synology to NOT hibernate idle drives (as recommended by the Synology Community). The argument is that stopping and starting drives leads to more wear and tear than spinning them continuously, even when idle.

[YankeeInLondon]

I want to say a BIG thank you to everyone who has responded. Really nice to have a community supporting you. I have taken @blgentry's advice in focusing on the NAS first but it's in a pretty dire situation at the moment where I can't even login anymore (even after hardware restarts) and I'm stuck with an every-other-day response from what appears to be level 1 support to enable remote access (which of course requires logging in). Anyway, guess I'll see if I can find a good Synology community to help me with this rather than official support.

You guys have been awesome. Really eager to get my pet music project back up and running and feel a lot more educated about MC now having heard from you all.

[JimH]

Very kind of you to say so.  I agree.  These people are amazing!

[HaWi]

I want to say a BIG thank you to everyone who has responded. Really nice to have a community supporting you. I have taken @blgentry's advice in focusing on the NAS first but it's in a pretty dire situation at the moment where I can't even login anymore (even after hardware restarts) and I'm stuck with an every-other-day response from what appears to be level 1 support to enable remote access (which of course requires logging in). Anyway, guess I'll see if I can find a good Synology community to help me with this rather than official support.

You guys have been awesome. Really eager to get my pet music project back up and running and feel a lot more educated about MC now having heard from you all.

There is a pretty good subreddit for Synology (r/Synology) and the Synology Community site (https://community.synology.com/enu) is also very helpful. If you would like me to help you with the NAS pls send me a PM. I am no expert but I have been using Synology for 4 years now.
Good luck!
Hans

[tangolovers]

Hello YankeeInLondon.... perhaps I'm a bit late to chime in, but I can finally report great success using Portable Library to use MC across OS's!!  Although I think my setup may be a lot less sophisticated than yours.  I basically have 3 independent computers - to Windows PC's & one MacBook Pro.  I can't address the RAID & NAS issues, but I can talk with you about the Portable Library function which is very easy to used and works great!!  No speed issues on my Mac. 

Here's my setup:  My music is stored on my main PC, although it doesn't really have to be in this model.  I then copied all of my music & my latest Library Backup to an external HD which I can now connect to either of my other computers and run MC and my Library (and playlists) look identical on all machines!!   On my source PC, my music is stored on C:\Users\susie\Music\My Music.  On my External HD "E", it is stored on E:\Music\My Music or /Volumes/E/Music/My Music, depending on which OS you're viewing it on.  Also, most importantly, I have a separate installation of MC26 (latest version) on all 3 machines. 

While MC does support a portable installation for Windows, I don't think it's portable to Mac at this point.  But with the Portable Library its now a snap of the fingers and my music & all of my playlists magically work on that computer. 

Now, it's all so simple. Here are my steps (after the first time, it will only be a couple of steps):

1) Make sure you have the latest version of MC install on all of your machines that will be used to run MC.

2) Copy your music & latest Backup Library to an external HD (ExFat formatted).

3) Plug in the external HD into whatever computer. 

4) Turn off Automatic Import: Tools > Options > Library & Folders > uncheck Run Run auto-import in background

5) Restore the backup library from external HD:  File > Library > Restore Library > locate Backup Library on your external HD, be sure to uncheck "Restore Settings", which will preserve your customized settings as they are. 

6) Verify Auto-Import is still off.

7) Added Portable Library Rule:  File > Library > Portable Library > Add Rule >
       On Mac:  Rule 1 = C:\Users\susie|/Volumes/E         
       On PC:    Rule 1 = C:\Users\susie|E:

It make take you a few trys to get everything working, but it's so easy once you get it.  I had to struggle a bit initially, but if a file didn't play, I ran Locate to see where it's looking for the file and where it actually is.  I did this by R-Clicking the audio file, selecting Tools > Locate > On Disk(external).  That will tell you where it's actually looking for the file based on your rule, and it will help you determine if your rule is entered correctly. 

Here's are my most recent posts where I received a lot of help to get the kinks worked out:
Mac Forum:  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,126123.0.html
Windows Forum:  https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,126128.0.html

I'm happy to help more however I can.   I have struggled with this for several years (the manual way) and finally MC has made super easy!!

[HaWi]

Hi Susie, I have followed the very detailed threads you had going to set up your portable library. First, congratulations you got it to work! I find myself in a similar situation now. I discovered a way people found to run MC on a NAS by using a Docker image and decided to use this as my primary MC server. However, I would like to continue using my iMac to manage the library and media. My media are also located on the NAS. What I have been doing so far is to back up the iMac library and restore it on the  NAS. Then reset the file locations for all files. That works but every time I update the library I have to go through an entire work flow to make it usable on the NAS. Therefore, I would like to try the portable library option. My question is this: For setting up the library rules, what  does the path before the pipe (|) refer to and what does the path after the | refer to. I am guessing before the | is the path to the library and after the | is the path to the media? is that correct?
Many thanks
Hans

[tangolovers]

Hello HaWi,

Unfortunately I don't have any experience running on a NAS or with Docker, so I don't know if my advice is helpful or not.  I would assume the Portable Library would still be a possibility.

Portable Library, I used to go through a very laborious process using Tools > Library Tools > RM&CF to rename with current path.  I don't know if that's the process you're referring to, but Portable Library has eliminated all of that and made it a breeze.  Let me see if I can explain again...

First of all some background:
Music files are located on my source PC#1 and that's where I do all of my editing & primary playback for now.  That's where I'm generating my Library Backup to be used on other platforms.  However, I need the capability to be able to play from my Mac as well as PC#2.   So, I copied all Music Files and the Library Backup from PC#1 to an External HD "E".   You may be thinking, why have a 2 copies of my music files that have to keep being updated every time I perform an edit, but I'll address that at the very end.  Now all simply plug my external HD "E" into PC#2, my Mac, or any other computer  running MC 26 or higher.  But when you create the Portable library you have to tell it what path to look for on your external hard drive.

I was wondering the same thing as you initially, because it was not clear for me how to use Portable Library Rule.  When you are adding a rule, the 1st part of the rule (before the "|") represents the path where your music is stored on the "source" which is what the Backup Library will be looking for the music.  The 2nd part of the rule (after the "|") is the path of the External HD where you music & Backup Library are now stored.  Let me explain:

On my PC#1 the complete path is C:\Users\susie\Music\My Music\. 
On my External HD "E", if it is plugged into my Mac, the complete path is path is /E/Music/My Music/...
On my External HD "E", if it is plugged into my PC#2, the complete path is path is E:\Music\My Music\...

Make sense so far?  When typing this manually, it's easy to get slashes and things mixed up, so hopefully I got it right as to not confuse you.

So, the Portable Library Rule would vary, depending which platform you're external drive is connected to: 

   External Drive connected to Mac:  Rule  = C:\Users\susie|/Volumes/E       
   External Drive connected to PC:    Rule  = C:\Users\susie|E:

You don't have to repeat the portion of the path that is the same on source & external drive (i.e.  /Music/My Music/).

If you have to experiment, delete the previous rule before creating a new rule.  I did notice that as you're creating a rule it initially calls it Rule 0, but after exiting add rule and reopening it, you will see the rule you just created is Rule 1.   

Ultimately, if this continues to work as well as I think, I really don't (and shouldn't) need to store my music on PC#1 because that creates double work when editing files/playlists, which requires updating the external HD.  I believe the ideal and most efficient way to use this is to have the external HD be your main source that you can play or edit from any computer.  So all of the edits are always being done to the same HD.   Of course you would then need to be sure you have a backup of that somewhere, which is why I haven't yet removed it from PC#1.  In that case, I'm not 100% certain what the rule would look like.  That should only affect the 1st part of the rule.  What I don't know yet is if the original source path will change as I edit and backup the library on "E". 

[HaWi]

Thank you so much for your detailed response.
I think I have figured it out. My premise differs from your's in that I only want to keep one working copy of my media (which is on the NAS on /Volumes/music as seen from the Mac and on /data/music as seen from the Docker Container on the NAS. The cool thing is that the Docker Container automatically creates a symbolic link to the /music folder in the /docker/config/data folder on the NAS that contains the media files, so that the media are accessible from the Docker Container in /data/music).
Naturally, I have multiple backups of the media folder, both stored locally and remotely.
I now keep the working library in the Docker Container so that I can serve my music from there and it being accessible 24/7 (the NAS is always-on) from anywhere in the world without having to have the iMac running all the time (heat issue, especially right now  ).
I created this library from a backup of the original Mac library. Since this library had the path set to /Volumes/music I generated the portable rule /Volumes|/data and it works perfectly on Docker. I also load the same library on my iMac and don't even need a portable rule because the path is already correct (/Volumes/music). And so, I have only one library, one media folder and can now edit the library on the Mac while still serving it from the NAS/Docker Container.
I guess, you could do the same thing, keep the library at the one location that is always on to serve the library and the media on your external drive to take it with you anywhere.
I am very happy with my set-up now. I would have never dared doing this without all of you guys' help and insight. So thank you again very much!
best wishes,
Hans

[tangolovers]

Glad to hear it worked!  Congratulations!