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With iTunes the art pretty much has to be embedded, since iTunes doesnt' report reliable info to find outboard art (in the way it stores it) unfortunately.
I have to assume that if it's taking that long that it's something related to the MP3 tag extraction over the network, which we do via the WMF SDK, so it has to be having some issue with accessing the files remotely on the NAS or something.
If you copy the files locally to the machine and point the driver at them there, what is the timing?
Dean Roddey
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10-30-2008, 03:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-30-2008, 03:05 PM by froop.)
I did one better and pointed the repo at a network share on my desktop instead of my NAS. Both are G/bit connected, but the desktop is XP running on a core2duo, and the NAS is a WD MyWorldBook running with Samba on embedded linux.
The same five albums took 3 seconds to load across the XP share compared to 33 seconds on the NAS share.
I knew I would be giving up some performance in favour of reduced power consumption, but I didn't realise my NAS performance was that poor!
It's certainly been fine for storing all my photos on. Certainly not as quick as having them locally, but certainly very usable. And music and movies play just fine. This is the first really bad performance hit.
Looks like I may just have to upsize the hard drive in my CQC server to store my MP3s locally there..
Edit: What's also curious, is that copying the files using explorer takes about 25 seconds XP to XP, as compared to ~45 seconds NAS to XP. Nowhere near the 10 fold increase in the CQC media repo load time.
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Copying files is a very different sort of thing than loading up embedded tags. Copying files is a very simple operation which contiguously accesses the files so it's easy to be highly optimized and just blast over successive blocks of optimal size. Searching for embedded tags involves a lot more fiddly reading of small bits of data, not necessarily contiguously.
Dean Roddey
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I'm currently using the File Tag repo, and for the most part its working well, however there are quite a number of my albums that show a blank title or artist, or both. All the MP3s in the albums have both v1 and v2 ID3 tags.
Any idea what could cause this?
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froop Wrote:Looks like I may just have to upsize the hard drive in my CQC server to store my MP3s locally there..
You may want to test this setup before buying the larger hard drive. While I have never used the File Tag method, this setup may cause you problems with iTunes. IF you run iTunes (and the iTunes CQC driver) on your master server AND have the mp3s on your master server, all of your music will have a local path when you add them to iTunes. While you would be able to play the mp3s on the master server, other CQC clients on your home network will not be able to play the mp3s because of the local reference in iTunes to the mp3s. (At least, I ran into this problem).
What I did - maybe not the best method - was to install iTunes on my master server, install the CQC iTunes driver on the master and place all of my mp3s in a shared directory on a different computer. When I add/import music into iTunes, the location contains the shared directory.
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10-31-2008, 08:48 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-31-2008, 08:54 AM by wuench.)
Download an mp3 tagger that lets you view both the v1 and v2 tags separately and use it to verify that your tags are correct (I use Media Tagger ). I have found a lot of inconsistencies in tags, sometimes the V1 tags and V2 tags are different or one may be incomplete. I haven't put enough time into figuring it all out, but the SDK/repo seems to have a preference of one tag over the other and some tagging/ripping programs don't update both tags correctly.
I actually delete the v2 tags using Media Monkey and just make sure the v1 tags are correct. I use Media Tagger to view them to double check the v2 tag is gone. Once I started using this process the issues with some stuff not showing up, weird categories appearing, and albums getting split up, went away.
The other thing I do, as far as cover art is concerned, is to make sure there is only one jpg in the directory. I use WMP to rip and it actually creates several hidden JPGs and it's hard to control which one the repo picks up. Then I make the whole directory read-only so WMP can jack it up again.
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LittleJohnny Wrote:IF you run iTunes (and the iTunes CQC driver) on your master server AND have the mp3s on your master server, all of your music will have a local path when you add them to iTunes.
There is an easy way around this, which is to add your music folders in itunes with the full network path, even if its on the local machine. Create your music share on the CQC Server, then in iTunes, goto File -> Add Folder To Library and type in, or browse, to the share name (\\cqcserver\music) even if its on the local machine.
This has worked a treat for me in the past.
