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Author Topic: Enormous Library questions  (Read 1637 times)

collector

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Enormous Library questions
« on: June 19, 2020, 01:57:00 pm »

Hi there!

I'm new to the JRiver forums, so if I'm posting in the wrong place please excuse me. I tried some preliminary searching of my question to no avail, so I'm posting anew in the hope of getting it answered. Right now, I use Roon with about a million tracks in mostly FLAC on NAS grade hard drives directly attached to my primary PC for local playback. I've got 16 cores and 32 threads of Threadripper power and 64GB of high perf memory, as well as flash for my OS and Roon itself, alongside its database. This is all well and good, but Roon has not been treating my large library very well. It takes nearly 8 timed minutes to launch, and uses around 11GB of memory at idle. I've read that JRiver is quite fast, and I'm willing to believe that, but I'd prefer to gather user experience before spending my CPU cycles and hard drive time on rescanning my library yet again. How big is your library? What's memory usage look like? How was the initial scan? Thanks in advance!

~Collector
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JimH

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #1 on: June 19, 2020, 02:06:03 pm »

Just download MC and try it.  It's free for 30 days.  Import your files overnight.

It won't take eight minutes to open.

See Getting Started in my signature.
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Awesome Donkey

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #2 on: June 19, 2020, 02:08:22 pm »

Instant open with JRiver Media Center for me with over 100,000 FLAC tracks.
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wer

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #3 on: June 19, 2020, 02:16:21 pm »

Welcome to the forums.

My own library is much more modest so I can't give you any direct experience wih a library of that size, but someone else might.  There are some people on the forum with extremely large libraries.

I can tell you that performing audio analysis on so many files will take a long time.  How many GB storage do your media files take up?

Just out of curiosity, what does one actually do with so many tracks, aside from collect them?  Listening for 12 hours a day, it would take you over 15 years to hear them all.
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collector

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #4 on: June 19, 2020, 02:38:53 pm »


I can tell you that performing audio analysis on so many files will take a long time.  How many GB storage do your media files take up?


I'm looking at about 45TB of media. I believe my primary library is in the neighborhood of 35TB (98.4% flac).



I can tell you that performing audio analysis on so many files will take a long time.  How many GB storage do your media files take up?

Just out of curiosity, what does one actually do with so many tracks, aside from collect them?  Listening for 12 hours a day, it would take you over 15 years to hear them all.
To answer your question about what I do with all that media- I am a vinyl and CD collector, and have painstakingly ripped, tagged and collected all of my CDs (~5-6k) and am in the process of doing the same with my storage unit of vinyl (35-40k records). I am a collector, parents worked in the industry so I have their collections, etc. I was hoping to get feedback about very large libraries because the scanning process for roon took longer than the free trial, and I am finding myself rather disappointed with Roon's speed so far despite chewing up my memory. As far as listening goes... I have music playing just about 24/7/365 on my speakers/headphones, I'm constantly finding new things that I may not have given enough attention to, and so on. It's my favorite hobby.
Instant open with JRiver Media Center for me with over 100,000 FLAC tracks.
What's your ram usage look like? Thanks.

Just download MC and try it.  It's free for 30 days.  Import your files overnight.

It won't take eight minutes to open.

See Getting Started in my signature.
This is my plan, but was hoping for some user feedback on their usage before I spent CPU/hard drive time and power on another piece of software. This is my fourth media player software attempt for my digital library. Thanks.
~collector

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timwtheov

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #5 on: June 19, 2020, 02:45:59 pm »

I used to have a library of about 1.2 million audio files (plus another 15,000 video files), and MC always started quickly (with less than half the PC processing power you have). I've since pruned to about 250,00 audio files, and MC is really quick with that amount.

The only problem performance-wise you might run into occasionally is if you're dealing with all one million files in one view scheme, which used to be a bit of a problem for me on occasion; but again, with your hardware, you'll probably be fine.

@Wer: with that many files, one is simply a collector. It's total insanity in my case, though the majority of my collection is classical, with numerious recordings of this opera and that symphony, plus I like to get into the weeds with forgotten composers. Nonetheless, again, it's really just complete madness in my particular case.  :P
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leezer3

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #6 on: June 19, 2020, 02:51:40 pm »

Approximately 300,000 files in the main library. (Relatively even balance between audio, video and images)
That's approximately 20TB worth of stuff all stored on my fileserver, which serves as the main library server.

The library server is a Windows 7, 4-core VM (Xeon E5620 running the show), 4gb of RAM with the datastore on a SSD.

Opens instantly on both clients and the server.

RAM usage when opened one of my larger viewschemes (~50,000 files, mix of images and video) is approximately 200mb.
I (off the top of my head) think this one has 2 or three calculated fields involved calculating custom sorting etc.


The only thing that can kill performance is seriously heavy use of calculated fields or the expression language in views. I've got a *lot* of stuff, but haven't managed to kill performance yet.
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Awesome Donkey

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #7 on: June 19, 2020, 02:53:42 pm »

What's your ram usage look like? Thanks.

With MC just running, 87MB. While playing back a FLAC file (no memory playback), 118MB. Doesn't use much on my system with 32GB of RAM.

If I were you, I'd just do what Jim said and just go for it. Hopefully you've got metadata in all your FLAC files though.
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Vocalpoint

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #8 on: June 19, 2020, 04:29:55 pm »

Hopefully you've got metadata in all your FLAC files though.

Exactly.

VP
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wer

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #9 on: June 19, 2020, 04:40:49 pm »

@Wer: with that many files, one is simply a collector. It's total insanity in my case, though the majority of my collection is classical, with numerious recordings of this opera and that symphony, plus I like to get into the weeds with forgotten composers. Nonetheless, again, it's really just complete madness in my particular case.  :P

I figured as much. I collect things too, so I get it.
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collector

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #10 on: June 19, 2020, 05:18:41 pm »

Hopefully you've got metadata in all your FLAC files though.

My tags are very, very good. Most are done by hand. Thanks for the input.
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woollies66

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #11 on: June 20, 2020, 03:16:03 am »

Hi

I have 3 nas's totalling 72tb.
1 nas music - 350k tracks 98% flac some wav's and dsf,
1 nas movies - 1080p 2000 movies
1 nas movies / Tv shows - 200 4k movies, 1500tv shows

i service about 8 diferrent devices (using "Gizmo") on an internal wired network , only using wifi for jriver "panel" as a remote control.

My media server is a similar spec to yours running windows 10

JRiver opens instantaneously. As mentioned previously watch out for custom views as this can cause slight delays, but nothing I found too onerous.

I have tried various media centre's, finding jriver about 5 years ago and I would never go back,
I recently had a sitaution whereby I had to rebuild my library which took about 6 hours

Hope this helps
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JimH

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #12 on: June 20, 2020, 07:05:14 am »

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rec head

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #13 on: June 20, 2020, 07:07:29 am »

Hi there!

I'm new to the JRiver forums, so if I'm posting in the wrong place please excuse me. I tried some preliminary searching of my question to no avail, so I'm posting anew in the hope of getting it answered.

...

If you do try MC I highly recommend you DO NOT analyze the audio on import. As stated above it will take a long time. Do the import then worry about analyzing it later. The Analyze feature gains you the Waveform feature and Volume Leveling which are not things you need just to try out the software. You can then analyze later in batches instead of all at once.
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Manfred

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #14 on: June 21, 2020, 03:44:31 am »

I have in total 27 TB media files out of 46 TB disk space with 42 000 files spread around audio, Images, video and documents. I have the client server model of MC with MC running centrally on a  WIN 10 Pro based Server with four media renderes around: PC, Livingroom Media Renderer, 2 x iPad's. MC stores media files separate from the meta data. A fast pcie x4 SSD is for the library. I use flat folder hierarchies e.g. one disk has one folder for all BD's with no subfolders. Let MC do the library management. For Audio simple Artist/Album. I have created several view's to browse the library.
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jherbert

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Re: Enormous Library questions
« Reply #15 on: June 22, 2020, 11:52:10 am »

Switching views, entering and performing searches and deleting files can become painfully slow with a large number of files. jriver is much slower in a listening situation (i.e. enter search, list result, select, play) than roon. This is true for startup time, also.

Having said that I use mediacenter for more than ten years now and still have not found anything that comes even close in functionality and versatility. As rec head mentioned before: Do not perform audio analysis during the initial read of your files.
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