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[Beth UK]

Hello,

I am a long time user of MC, currently using MC15.0.173. System is WIndows 7 64-bit.

Suddenly, in the last couple of days, I have experienced horrendous 'pauses' when switching quickly between tracks. By pause I mean the interface freezes for up to 15 seconds. Rarely MC now crashes. MC is now barely usable.

I have not experienced this before. Music is stored on an internal drive. Tried another (lesser) MP3 player and that is accessing the tracks without a problem so I am guessing this is not a hard drive access problem. Tried reinstalling.

Any ideas before I go mad? ?

Thank you
Beth

[EnusOtis]

I face the same problem. It started with .171 or .172.

[Beth UK]

I have just reinstalled earlier MC 15.0.150 - no change. Horrible delays when switching between songs.

[JimH]

Are you using Last.fm and scrobbling?

[Beth UK]

Are you using Last.fm and scrobbling?

Ahhh...yes...and Last FM is really slow at the moment!

Disabled scrobbling.

Cured. Thanks 

[gappie]

ive been seeing the same since yesterday i think... ive disabled scrobling now too.. lets see how it goes..
 
gab

[gappie]

disabling the last fm scrobbler works great.. i just had the long delay while playing music.. the famous 6 seconds for the end the position thingy stopped for a long time, and the task manager said mc was not responding. after a while it jumped to the next track.
 
gab

[Matt]

I saw the same as well.  Something was wrong with the Last.fm servers yesterday.

We Scrobble in a background thread, but if we go to scrobble a second file, and there's still a thread running, we wait for it.

We'll change this a little in the future, so even if their server does't work at all, it won't slow down the program.

[gappie]

I saw the same as well.  Something was wrong with the Last.fm servers yesterday.

We Scrobble in a background thread, but if we go to scrobble a second file, and there's still a thread running, we wait for it.

We'll change this a little in the future, so even if their server does't work at all, it won't slow down the program.

that would be nice.. i do not loose a night sleep over the scrobbles, but it would nice if they get there some way.

thanks
 
gab

[sunfire7]

I was experienced the same, but thanks matt for the answer! 

[MusicHawk]

Same problem -- switching tracks by clicking on them sometimes takes 30 to 60 seconds! Suggested fix doesn't seem applicable, hoping for other suggestions...

MC used to run fabulously on this PC, so it's a shock that it now is virtually unusable when manually jumping among tracks. MC switches tracks on its own (to next track in list) just fine, implying the problem is only when choosing a random new track. BUT, this used to work perfectly too, until a few days ago. Other aspects of MC seem to be responsive even now; the problem seems limited to random manual track switching.

Behavior: Start a track playing, which is now always slow to start. While playing, click another track in the list. The playback TIMER freezes, but the music keeps playing and the "meters" keep bouncing. AND, the cover image of the NEW track immediately appears! Eventually (30 seconds or more) the new track starts to play and the display switches to show its running time.

Not using Last.FM, never used it, no account there, so presumably that means it is "disabled"? If not, how can it be truly disabled? Anything else MC could be doing in the background that I can disable?

The problem happens even when Task Manager shows Media Center 15.exe using 50% of CPU, and the other 50% used by System Idle Process. Paging file use is very low.

The PC doesn't seem suspect -- everything else runs on it at top speed (dual proc, 3GB RAM, etc). I can open 50 tabs in Firefox and it doesn't slow down (just a test ). Disabling MSE doesn't help. No changes in system hardware of software. No evidence of major drive fragmentation, but running a defrag just in case...

The only "change" has been to install MC16 to buy the new license. In fact, that's roughly when the problem appeared. MC16 is not yet being used actively, but could its installation somehow have affected the performance of MC15 by altering the registry or substituting a key file?

[Matt]

This was added to v16:
NEW: Last.fm submitter maintains a queue of submissions instead of a single submission so when there's no internet or Last.fm is having problems, there is no performance impact on the program and Scrobbles don't get dropped.

MusicHawk, I think you're having a different problem.  You might try v16, and if it's still an issue, start a new thread on the version 16 board.

Thanks.

[JimH]

This is not normal.

What are you playing?  MP3?  FLAC?  Any Apple files?

From where?  A NAS drive?  Local?

Virus checker?  Try disabling.

Do you have IE9 installed?  Uninstall it if so.

[MusicHawk]

As I said, no change in the system, same local drive that was serving MC perfectly (and still serves other apps without noticeable problem). Virus checker disabled.

But, you might have isolated the problem: I was playing FLAC tracks -- new rips -- and discovered the very long switching delays. In response to your suggestion, I tried to some older MP3 files, and NO PROBLEM -- INSTANT track switching. Same drive, etc.

FLAC files are larger, so load/play delay could be explained by MC doing more work? BUT -- this delay didn't used to happen with FLAC, or with ANY format (I also have APE and WAV here and there). I switched to FLAC some time ago with nothing unusual, until now. More testing: Very slow to switch among WAV files too. But MP3s seem reliably fast.

Back to the "coincidence" of MC16 installation -- any chance it installed a new codec or made a related change that affects MC15 playback of FLAC?

[JimH]

FLAC alone can't be the problem.  Neither is MC16.

What did you rip the files with and at what settings?

What build of MC are you using?  Did you try MC16?

[MusicHawk]

Problem "solved", but unclear how/why. So, for what it's worth...

As another test, I imported 20 WAV files (rip of vinyl album). Converted to FLAC using MC defaults. Working in Recently Imported view, both WAV and FLAC very slow to load/play.

Then I ALSO converted the WAVs to MP3 Extreme. So, the view had 60 files, each song in 3 formats. Suddenly, I could switch between tracks -- in any mix of the three formats -- instantly! No restart, nothing else changed, just added to Recently Imported by doing format conversions.

The implication, I suppose, is that the Recently Imported view and/or database was "stuck" or somehow in a very inefficient state, and doing the two file conversions thereby updated the view/playlist/database which "fixed" it. I appreciate the suggestions from Jim and Matt that led to resolution. I "fixed it" before trying MC16 (which I earlier uninstalled to see if there was possible interaction), so now can only cite it as an MC15 incident.

For the future, I wonder if there is or could be a "check and repair" or "optimize" database operation that can be run in MC? (A pure database integrity/structure process, not combined with actions that potentially update data.) I would imagine it under Advanced Tools, but haven't located anything in MC that obviously does just this. It's common in other database platforms and at times its been a life (or hair) saver. Applicable to MC's architecture, or not?