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[jherbert]

I just did a major overhaul of my collection cleaning up the artist lastname, firstname mess and deleting most entires in album artist.

Doing this went smoothly thanks to the use of regular expressions and some field to field copy.

Im am using an external USB2 disc for storage. Three questions:

- is this the performance to be expected with  +100.000 files?
- I closed MC18 and the tag writing continues. What happens if the process is interruptend? We will have a thunderstorm tonight, and I would like to turn my computer off.
- Is there a way to speed up the whole process?

Thank you for looking into this.

[JimH]

USB 2.0 isn't very fast.

[jherbert]

Yes, I know. But that's what I have to deal with right now.

What happens when tag writing is interrupted? Will writing be resumed once the system is back, or will I end up with a broken database?

[Arindelle]

What happens when tag writing is interrupted? Will writing be resumed once the system is back, or will I end up with a broken database?

I had to stop the process manually once through task manager. You will not break the data base (just in case, you do have a backup of your library everytime you do major operations like this, don't you? ) There "might" be a couple of files with the tags corrupted...

Writing was not resumed when I did this ... simply reselect the files and re-write the tags from the beginning .... will be fast up to the point where you stopped .. only seemed to change the metadata not in sync with the library.

This is not a thing you have to do often, right? I only used library towards files once when I erased 180gb of music before a backup. You can set your fields to save to file when possible and check the "Update tags when file info changes" option under edit, just in case you weren't aware

[jherbert]

@arindelle Thank you, that is good to know.  The system ist still working, 55,000 to go. I did not force writing tags but did a major reorganisation of the artist information. I would have written that information anyway, as I need the tagged files for use in other programs. And yes, such a task might come up every two or three years only, so I will be patient.

[MrC]

It is possible that your antivirus software is slowing operations, and/or your files don't have a tag padding block and require rewriting the entire file for tag changes.

[Arindelle]

and/or your files don't have a tag padding block and require rewriting the entire file for tag changes.

hmm guess I do .. but never heard of a "tag padding block", what is this? Don't remember doing anything special to my files/options ... just seems to go really fast until a change and then slows to write, speeds up etc?

[MrC]

Music file formats use a chunk of the file to write tags, and this chunk is at the head of the file.  When a replaced or new tag exceeds that size, a larger chunk size must often be created to accommodate the new values.  In some cases, this means re-writing the entire file, providing for the increased space requirements.  And this can be very slow with very large files (aggravating factors; slow disks, antivirus, network storage).

In a compromise, some file formats allow for specifying larger chunks for the tags, some of which remains empty.  New or large tag values fill this empty area instead of requiring re-writing the entire file (since there's typically room to patch in the new values).  But these are fixed-sized chunks, and can also be exceeded.

See attached.

[Arindelle]

Thanks for the info Mr. C.  I rip using an external program ... guess this is a default, lucky for me

[MrC]

Check its encoder options.  You haven't mentioned which file type, or ripper, so I can't comment further.  Programs like EAC and others uses the open source flac encoder/decoder, and allow passing of options to control this.

[Arindelle]

Ok, just checked. I use dbPoweramp. It is set to: FLAC IDTag Padding 4kb.(never touched this setting myself--seems to default to this)

Wondering if I should raise this to 8kb (goes all the way to 512kb in the config, seems a bit overkill )?