Users with larger collections sometimes experienced effects that never occurred with smaller collections.
The latest MC27 Build 43 runs smoothly even with distributed data carriers and even with a modest RAM expansion.
The RAM requirement is no longer based on the largest thumbnail file. Even with a 'Thumbnails (large) .jmd' of more than 5GB, blocking paging no longer occurs on a computer with only 4GB RAM.
With the appropriate configuration, MediaCenter now allows you to browse through the library without accessing the media files. Users with video collections on distributed data carriers are no longer blocked by sleeping drives.
I use an Asus 4-core barebone with 4GB Ram and 120GB SSD in the living room. 140,000 songs and 215,000 photos are stored on the NAS. 4000 films are distributed over 8 HDDs which are connected to the NAS via USB3.
For the music collection, I use complex queries with calculated fields. The view filters the artists appearing in a certain folder and then expands the selection of these artists to all folders. In the Artist \ Album view, all occurrences in MultiArtist albums would lead to countless albums. Instead of 'Albums' I therefore group according to a calculated field which returns an empty string for multi-artist albums and the album name for all other albums. The scattered individual titles all appear under 'unassigned' in a group.
There is indeed a lot to calculate and sort out. But the latest media center easily manages that even with this modest equipment.
With one caveat: I only use TheaterView and Views in Category View. In the Panes view, changing from one album to the next takes around 2 seconds. I only use this view on very fast computers which I use for tagging and organizing the database.
