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[k.e.]

Hello,

I am currently testing MC23 on Mac. I have tried it on two systems, MacBook Pro (upgraded to i7, 16 GB ram) and a new iMac 4K 2017 (4GB VRAM, upgraded to full SSD and 16 GB ram).

When browsing my small collection of music (4.000 files, all perfectly tagged), it stutters and lags. There are no issues with playback. Audio plays fine (even with DSP corrections like convolution and crossfeed). But there is absolutely no reason why scrolling in the window wouldn't be the most fluid experience ever. It just feels extremely poorly optimized.

I have seen my friend use MC22 on his dated Windows machine and scrolling through the artwork was as smooth as my experience with iTunes.

Is this a known problem or is this just the case how it's used to be on Mac? Currently I only want to use the Panes view because browsing artworks is too choppy.

[blgentry]

There are two potential issues here:

1.  Before thumbnails are built, they will "pop" into place as MC renders the thumbnails.  If I remember correctly, this also slows down scrolling, particularly if you are scrolling "fast".

2.  The overall smoothness of scrolling on MC for Mac is not as good as it is on MC for Windows.  On a small screen you don't notice it as much.  On a larger screen it's more obvious.  I'm not sure why this is.  It kind of "jerks" into place every few degrees of rotation on the mouse scroll wheel.  It would be nice if it more more "fluid".  I'm not sure if the developers want to work on this or not.  It's been brought up several times in the past few years.

For #1 above, you can force MC to rebuild all remaining thumbnails.  This might take a while depending upon how many files you have:  Tools > Options > Tree & View > Thumbnails > rebuild missing thumbnails.

Brian.

[k.e.]

Thank you for the reply.

My issue is concerning option 2. It's just something that immensely bothers me as an (audiophile) photographer and designer. If this has been an issue for years, I doubt JRiver will actually fix it. I already have a strong feeling the Mac port is half-hearted. Back when I tried MC22 on my old Mac, the option for convolution just didn't want to work.

I guess I will consider alternative software.
Thanks!

[blgentry]

Sorry to hear you might be going elsewhere.  MC is super duper powerful.  I wouldn't use any other software on the Mac that I've personally tried.  MC is the best compromise for me.

I wish you luck which ever way you go.

Brian.

[RoderickGI]

Before making your final judgement you really should check under Help > System Info... to check if all thumbnails have been built, and if any background processes are still running, since this is a new installation.

Also, Hendrik is working on an OpenGL version of Windows, to replace Direct3D, for Theatre View. OpenGL isn't quite as good as Direct3D yet, but it is getting better, and the improvements found will no doubt pass over to the Mac/OSX versions of MC which have always used OpenGL I understand. Of course that won't change how well Standard View scrolls, but maybe Theatre View is good enough. At least there is recognition of the need for visual improvement.

Also, even in Windows scrolling through audio thumbnails isn't that great as it seems to display one row of thumbnails at a time, which gives it a jerky feel. It would be better if the display flowed smoothly instead.

Be an influencer! Get JRiver to change how it works!

[k.e.]

I have tried Audirvana 3+ yesterday. It's incredible how smooth the experience is. The UI looks tons better than JRiver's and browsing album art feels like 120 Hz opposed to 12 Hz on MC23. When using the latter I feel like I am running Windows software through Wine emulator on Linux...
But unfortunately Audirvana is not even close to Media Center's feature list because it thinks bad about DSP: no (parametric) EQ, no crossfeed, no convolution, not even listening tests, ... basically nothing that let's you experiment with audio and I think that is also an important part of audiophile listening. Whole bunch of marketing for a ridiculous price. Shame.
I also came across the open-source Kodi but it was not what I think it would be. So I continued my search and I couldn't find any software that comes close to MC, unfortunately.

Before making your final judgement you really should check under Help > System Info... to check if all thumbnails have been built, and if any background processes are still running, since this is a new installation.

Thumbnails built: 100%
Audio analyzed: 100%
Background tools running: No tools currently running.

It's nice to hear that JRiver is still working on improvements. But let's be honest here, MC23 has zero new features over MC22, or am I missing something? An internet radio channel called Kiss - that's what JRiver charges 27$ for? So when the Mac improvements hit, I will be paying 50 $ for what looks like a beta program and a year later I can pay another 27 $ without new features just because JRiver thinks they need to charge users every year. What if MC24 has zero new features (a new radio called Queen) but MC25 brings the Mac improvements. I can't upgrade from MC23 so I have to pay a 2x 50 $ or 50 +27 +27 to stay up to date... They could just as well start a subscription plan for 5 $/month. But even then we wouldn't even know if they ever fix the Win98'esque UI.

Sorry for the rant. I was hoping there would be an easy fix to my problem or box I forgot to tick for hardware acceleration or something. I didn't expect to have to live with the lag.

[JimH]

What you're seeing is not normal.  It would be better to concentrate on finding the cause.

Something related to screen or disc is not delivering what it should.

Are the media files local?  If not, try a library of only local files.

What file types?

[Awesome Donkey]

Honestly? The scrolling (and the way fonts look all jaggy in non-Retina) in MC for Mac is the worst compared to MC for Windows and Linux. It's very choppy even when scrolling down a large list in the Panes view (so I can imagine how it's like for album view). I have a somewhat workaround for speed by increasing the system scrolling speed, but yeah, it's still pretty choppy and slow compared to Windows and Linux. I'm not sure if it inherits the system settings for scrolling or not - if it does, IMO, this might be the cause of this and it really should use its own instead.

As for fonts, yeah, they're pretty bad and jaggy when using non-Retina. The second you enable Retina mode for a supported skin, fonts look AMAZING. If it's possible to get the way the fonts look in Retina mode to look like that in non-Retina, that'd be absolutely great and much appreciated. It's worth noting that in my experience when you enable Retina mode, scrolling performance and speed actually become worse than it does in non-Retina (which IMO is already noticeably bad compared to Windows/Linux).

If there was two things on my immediate wishlist for MC for Mac, it'd be improvements (or an overhaul) to scrolling performance, speed and smoothness along with better looking fonts in non-Retina mode (e.g. some Anti-Aliasing would be nice!).

[Sassi]

I have this same problem. I am running on MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar 2016.

It helps to make the window smaller by dragging from one corner so that fewer album covers are shown. (Not from the album art scaling slider setting on the upper right corner) That makes the scrolling much more fluid. I initially thought it might be because my album art is in very large files scanned by me. We are talking about 3000x3000 pixels in jpeg format. Could this cause it?

Other programs like Tidal work very smoothly while showing similar album art etc.

The theater view is absolutely fluid and smooth though with the same artwork. I would also like to find a "fix" for this.

Thanks! I love MC23 and would not think of using any other program. 

By the way, could a real full screen option be added to MC23, please.

[Sassi]

To add to previous message. Using JRemote all the album artwork scroll up and down very smoothly on my iPad 2017. The sluggish movement is only in the Mac version of MC23 in the normal album views. It was the same also on MC22.  ?

[Hendrik]

As for fonts, yeah, they're pretty bad and jaggy when using non-Retina. The second you enable Retina mode for a supported skin, fonts look AMAZING. If it's possible to get the way the fonts look in Retina mode to look like that in non-Retina, that'd be absolutely great and much appreciated.

I've been poking font rendering for a bit to see if there is a simple reason it draws like this, but it appears to be that Mac Cocoa Font APIs just dumb when it goes about rendering into bitmaps.
What I did wonder though, when would you ever not use Retina mode? Even with an external screen, which is not in any way high enough resolution to be considered retina (24" 1080p), Retina mode works and looks just fine.

Another thing I noticed, the jaggyness of the fonts is greatly exaggerated if you look on it on a Retina screen without Retina mode, presumably because of the way OSX upscales the image.

[JimH]

We should probably switch to Retina as the default.

[Awesome Donkey]

The reason I don't use Retina mode is because its scrolling performance is much worse than in non-Retina mode. It's way more laggy - if those issue(s) could be solved then I'll happily use it.

[Hendrik]

I may have found the reason for the slow UI rendering, but fixing it is another matter entirely, since it goes pretty deep.

[Awesome Donkey]

Oh, what is it? I'm curious! I assume it's specific to the Mac and nothing that could benefit MC on Windows and Linux too?

It *might* be worth considering, especially if Retina is going to be the default. I can see how the slow UI performance could be a turnoff to some potential users.

[Hendrik]

Its related to how we render bitmaps. You can either render them upside down (flipped) or normal. Windows uses flipped bitmaps, so Mac also opted to use flipped rendering - but it appears this mode is using a super slow Cocoa rendering fallback.
So its entirely Mac specific.

[Awesome Donkey]

I assume then it's not possible then to switch all bitmaps to another format, e.g. PNG?

[Hendrik]

For rendering on the screen everything is uncompressed RGB in memory. But we're investigating how much effort it is to flip it around so we can use the fast mode.
Practically the entire UI is a whole collection of bitmaps. If you just flip the switch the entire MC renders upside down, its kinda amusing.

[Awesome Donkey]

Hahaha, screenshot please! I gotta see this upside down UI.

But yeah, that's actually pretty interesting (especially considering skins use PNG files as its resources). Hopefully there's some clever trick to allow it to be used.

[Hendrik]

Maybe we should offer this as a mode for the aussies?


The interesting part is, as unusable as it is upside down, it feels a lot smoother just because Cocoa can use the optimized renderer (just from mouse-wheeling over the cover list, which is about the only thing I manage to do)
So now we need to figure out if we can "just" flip everything on our side so it acts properly again.

[RoderickGI]

The interesting thing about that flipped display is that it took my brain less than 10 seconds to adjust and start seeing the content from the other side of the screen, flipped up, and reading what was there.

Brains are amazing.

[Sassi]

Please, I would appreciate it very much if you could somehow be able to make use of the "fast mode". I know a lot of people would be very thankful for it. 

I do know it must be hard work to make it so. Thanks! 

[k.e.]

Yes, I would also be quite happy if this can be fixed. But is there a reason even the fonts have to be used as bitmaps? So that's why the menu looks like it's out of place or running through some emulator. There must be a way to use the native macOS environment for the drop-down menus at least.

I don't have any issues with the font, but I would like to double-check. Where can I find the option for retina mode? I assume it's automatically activated when it recognizes a 4K retina screen?

[Awesome Donkey]

Oh wow, everything's flipped. I didn't think the fonts and menus would be too, but that's actually pretty neat to see.

You can enable Retina by going to the View menu > then Size then selecting Retina mode. As far as I know, it's not automatically activated.