Update: Slow loading resolved. The reply from Awesome Donkey cut the waiting down from 10 minutes plus to just a few seconds for each stage, much better. I have 3 JRiver directories on my system disk (in Program Files, Program Files x86, and in my User Account directory). I put all 3 of those directories in as exceptions. Why is MC the only software I've ever installed in Win 10 or Win 11 where I've had to do that? There were NO other exceptions in Microsoft Security in Win 11 Home, so other installed software doesn't require exceptions.
My desktop computer is around 1 year old. 10-core i5 processor. SSD that loads Win 11 Home in 15 seconds. Every app I run from MS Office to Firefox to Network Analyzers to other media players load super-fast and begin running within seconds of starting. When I start MC33, it takes 3 minutes for the main screen to open... 3 Minutes! This puts Drives and Devices in the upper-left corner of the MC33 window. When I try to open a Folder via Drives and Devices, it takes another 3 minutes to open a folder. When I then double-click a video file, I give up waiting for it to begin playing after 5 minutes. I then dismiss MC33 by clicking the red X in the MC33 window, it takes at least 2 minutes for MC33 to quit. MC 32 performed the same. No other apps I've ever run on this computer are slow to respond like MC33.
I have purposely NOT created an MC33 Library because none of the MC33 interfaces are very useful for dealing with my media. I love the GUI with "cover art" BUT why do I have to scroll though 100s of titles to get to the titles that begin with letters at the end of the alphabet? Why is there no A, B, C, D, E, F.... nav bar so I can skip straight to any part of the alphabet instantly. Why should I have to scroll through 300+ video titles to get to the end of the alphabet?
My library consists of 3 multi-drive NAS units... one has 2 drives in RAID with 6 TB of storage; and two more units have 4 hard drives each, each in 2-drive RAID configuration, with each pair of drive-pair having 4 TB to 8TB per drive. I have 4500 music albums that total around 50,000 tracks all lossless CD-quality FLAC, and maybe 1200 titles in high-res lossless (24-48 up to 24-192) FLAC-these stay the same with new titles added weekly. I have probably 300 DVR'd video files that turn-over with some regularity as watched shows are deleted and new shows or movies are added.
None of the NAS units have drive letters. I have successfully used them for 6 years without drive letters by using the the simple Windows \\NetworkDrive\folder1\folder2\folder3 notation. Albums are filed alphabetically, then there is a folder for each artist, and all the albums for an artist are inside the artist folder. I want to be able to navigate directly to "S" for example, then navigate artists until I find Supertramp, then I want to nav the album art of Supertramp albums. This should take 5-8 seconds or so, but LONG scrolls through album art to get to Supertramp titles makes that user interface pathetically slow. So I've defaulted to using Drives and Devices to navigate right to where I want to go... music, or video. All the NAS devices appear as separate "drives", but it takes MC33 3 minutes to open a NAS, and when I open a folder and pick something to play, there's another delay so long, I give up waiting after 5 minutes. This is making MC33 useless to me.
I run a VPN but that is not involved with MC33 since the NAS drives are on the Ethernet LAN and the computer is on the same Ethernet LAN, connected to the same router as the NAS devices (all 3 of them are on Ethernet).
I am running Windows Security (or Windows Defender if they are still calling it that).
I first began using MC back around version 16. I stopped using it after MC17 due to the inability to navigate quickly to the end of the alphabet with 4000 or more albums on my 2 NAS/RAID devices that store all the music. I quit MC until MC22. I found the same issues with MC22, but it loaded quickly and I could load an individual album quickly. After MC22 I was still annoyed with not being able to jump quickly to the end of the alphabetical list of artists so I let MC go for several years until the offer to upgrade to MC33. At the time, MC33 was a month or two from release so I started using MC32 with all the problems noted here. I then installed MC33 and continue to have the slow loading problems. I have never had MC running this painfully slow as MC 32 and 33 have been running since they were installed. This has made MC unusable for me. Entirely useless.
Is there something about MC32/33 that makes it choke on very large libraries, even if the "library" is not an MC Library... again, I'm just using the "drives & devices" list to navigate quickly to titles I want to enjoy. For example, the Supertramp album... in Drives & Devices, I can pick the folder containing artists names starting in St to Sz. Open that, scroll down to Supertramp, open that, pick the album "Even in the Quietest Moments", and play the album. Up to MC22 I could do that in less than 10 seconds. Now after 11 minutes of waiting, the album is STILL NOT PLAYING. What is going on?
Edit:
I noticed it may not be clear what file types I am using... for music, almost 100% are FLAC. For video, maybe 5% are MP4, 5% are avi, and 90% are mkv files. Of the video files, about half are 4K/UHD 10 bits with HDR and about half are 1080p that may or may not be HDR--and those with HDR have 10 bits while those without HDR are 8-bits. File sizes for video range from 500 MB to 120 GB ("big" Blu-ray movie RIPs from discs are the largest files, like the Director's Cut UHD/4K versions of Lord of the Rings that ran close to 4 hours). I should also make it clear that these files all play fine and very quickly with video player apps running on Android smart TVs and PC Media Player apps like VLC (free) all play the same files on the same drives on the same computer without any of MC33/32's delays. The 11 minutes of waiting comes from 3 minutes waiting for MC33 to start. Another 3 minutes for MC33 to open a folder selected in Drives & Devices, and another 5 minutes of "loading" the selected movie or TV show... that never even begins playing within those 5 minutes... I just get bored of waiting any longer for something it is probably never going to load and play. Sometimes MC33 does display "Something went wrong with playback" while providing no insight into exactly what might have been wrong. And I should mention that I have two more USB Hard disks running on the host computer along with a 2 TB USB SSD, a 1 TB USB SSD, and 2 x 256 GB USB thumb drives. Most of those devices are 1/4 to 3/4 full of music or video or both, but I am not selecting them in MC33, I am only selecting the NAS drives in MC33, not any of the USB memory devices.