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[azdood]

Ever since I got my new MC10 I've been downloading music from the internet like Sherman going through Georgia.  It's a great new world I've discovered but I find that I have to defrag every night because of it.  And the defrags are major ones.  Watching the monitor I can see lots of adjustment being made.  It got so bad I had to get a program called Power Defrag because my computer took forever to do the defrag otherwise.

My question is: Are the settings on my MC or computer causing this?  Did I overlook something in setting my MC up?

Thanks!

[JimH]

Is your disk getting full?

[hit_ny]

I'll venture a guess. (but this only applies to mp3s)

If you use ID3v2 tags for your media files, its possible this will cause deframentation. The reason is if the file itself does not contain an ID3v2 tag, it is written to the beginning of the file causing a correponding shift in the file structure. However it only happens once/file.

Plugin Manager->Input->Mp3 Plugin->Configure->Mp3 Configuration

You will notice here that the default is to create an ID3v2 tag.

You can disable IDv2 and use IDv1 (which writes at the end of the file as opposed to the start). But IDv1 wont support ratings or replay gain information.

The solution seems to be to turn of writing tags to the file and save them in the database only.

Tools->Options->General->IMporting & Tagging->Update tags when file info changes (uncheck)

This cuts down on the defragmentation, but if ever your library were to become corrupt you would lose information that is not in the files.

Personally i stuck with the defaults and defragged often (once a week) until my library became more stable. I prefer info like ratings be stored in the files as well for the reason i mentioned above.

[Alex B]

You can avoid that problem simply by downloading (and ripping) to a different drive (or partition). Import files to MC and do all the tagging. When the files are ready let MC move them to the final location. The best thing would be if you could have a dedicated partition for the media library files.

If you have only the C: partition you could buy an extra hard drive. You may also find other use for it.  

Personally I don't let MC write ratings or other constantly changing information to the file tags. I don't want to do new media file backups just because I have changed ratings. Instead I do library backups daily. That takes only about some seconds.

[azdood]

Thank you everyone.  I disabled IDv2 as hit_ny suggested, but could you please explain what it meant by "won't replay gain information?"

I'm also learning how to backup the library, so I'll be doing that as Alex suggested.

To answer JimH, I still have about half of my drive space left, but it's going fast.

I'm still getting used to being able to have such total control over my media.  Until now, I was pretty much letting Microsoft dictate what was best for me.  This is very liberating.

I'll download and burn some more music today and see if the new settings will help the defrag problem.  I'm also, in the next week or so, doing a major upgrade.  I'm getting the maximum memory my computer will house, getting a new CD/DVD burner and getting another drive.

As always, thanks so much for your help.



 

[hit_ny]

I disabled IDv2 as hit_ny suggested, but could you please explain what it meant by "won't replay gain information?"

My mistake replay gain information is not stored in the files but in the library.

Replay gain is volume normalisation. So when you do Audio Analysis on your files, MC (using Replay gain) will set the volume of your files to  a similar level so when mixing the volume difference between tracks is minimal. Note that it saves a setting (associated with the file) in the library and no modification to the file is done.

Using ID3v1 limits you to max 30 chars in titles etc. Not sure if this is enough for you (it wasn't for me). There is no such limit for ID3v2.

Personally i use the default setting ie..use ID3v2 instead of ID3v1 only. The defragmentation problem will reduce once your library is stable.

Also follow Alex's suggestion above to do tagging (creation of ID3v2 tags) in one partition (say your incoming partition) and only then transfer over to your final location.

[azdood]

Thanks hit_ny.  If I use only ID3v2 I know it will work for my personal home use, but if I then burn a CD to play in the car or give to a friend, I'm afraid the CD won't play there.  Is that a realistic concern and is there any happy compromise?  Thanks.  

[modelmaker]

Unless you notice an appreciable slowdown of your computer, a once a week defrag should be fine and as has been mentioned the drive will become less fragmented as the library stabilizes.

My files are almost exclusively tagged using Id3v2 and I have never heard of any of my friends having problems playing them, nor have I and I play them in the car stereo, on a portable and tho rarely now the home stereo CD player (as I mostly use my computer/MC as my source)

[azdood]

 I picked ID3v2 as my dowadiddy, but I'm not sure what to do with that little box that says: Ignore ID3v2 During Analysis.  Should I have that checked or unchecked?