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[benn600]

A while back when I tested a 9 thousand song MP3 library, Media Center flew.  It seems like libraries with MP3 files are much faster than libraries with FLAC.  Is there a hook being called for each library display that slows everything down?  Is there a way to more separate MC from the FLAC plugin so it doesn't get called when not needed.  I'm merely guessing but it seems like extra calculation is done with FLAC files for all actions such as switching views, maximizing Media Center, searches (especially), etc.  I was amazed how much faster mp3's were with MC that time I tried it.  Any ideas?

[scthom]

Can you be a little more specific?  I have both MP3 and FLAC on my machine here and both seem to work about the same for me.

[Osho]

I was amazed how much faster mp3's were with MC that time I tried it.  Any ideas?

I have both FLAC and MP3 and never noticed this issue. If you have a slow hard drive - this may be an issue as FLAC files are pretty big and they may need to be read completely for tags etc.

Osho

[hit_ny]

Out of curiosity does FLAC write tags at the beginning or end of the file ?

Not that i think it matters once its in the library anyway.

[scthom]

Out of curiosity does FLAC write tags at the beginning or end of the file ?

FLAC writes at the beginning.  http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_format_overview.html

[benn600]

I think some of the issue might be that every time I tested MP3's, I had no cover art.  My old mp3 library was very random with lots of bit rates and hardly if any cover art.  My flac library is completely flac, excluding podcasts, and it all has cover art.  I'm thinking the cover art generation slows it down a great deal.  If I spend many hours creating cover art on my main computer and move to my theater computer, all the cover art has to be regenerated and it seems to unlink the cover art from my main computer.  The cover art seems to slow it down quite a bit if I have an image turned on for each song.

It also could be Vista.  I think Vista seems a bit slow but I need to reformat again and see how it runs from a fresh install.  The install I did copied my old system files and installed on free space...meaning everything probably got fragmented and really messed up.

Also, is there a command line option to resize cover art when music is being converted?  I store huge cover art files and syncing with cover art copies this jpg to every mp3 which can really add up at 1 MB per song.  I may just disable cover art completely until we can find a solution since it really takes a huge amount of space at 20-30%.