Large Number of Songs Support

[crackity]

OK I just stumbled onto this player after winamp5 decided that it liked crashing when it was idle.....

Anyways, I think this proggie rocks, completely love the quicktracks idea, just have one small problem. Large number of files and quicktrack seem not to like each other. Now I have tried playing around with different options, etc but havent found something that works yet.

Here is what happens.

I can load a relatively small directory, ie Ska, just great and quicktrack will pop up after a second or two delay

But when I load my Punk directory (I would guess somewhere around 13000 songs) problems occur. QCD starts playing relatively quick which I am more then pleased with. The problem is when I right click on the Scrolling title to launch QuickTracks. The player will freeze for a very long time. I have had it come back and be able to play music again, but the Quicktrack wont come up (right click, it thinks for a second then does nothing) and actually cant even get the QCD main menu to pop up, so QCD is only halfway functional. (err looks like I cant even get right menus in the explorer window I used to play the directory)

Is there a way to get quicktracks to load faster by turning off certain options?

Do you think the problem with quciktracks not loading just has to do with the number of songs, or the possibility that there may be a rotten apple song somewhere the QCD has trouble loading?

System info:
QCD B67
P4 2.6 800
512 mB DRR3200
ATI 9600 Pro
XP sp1 is on a 100 gB drive and my music is on a RAID 5 setup with 4 160 gB drives.

PS - if there is no good way to solve getting Quicktracks to work whcih I could deem somewhat understandable because that is a lot of music, is there a way to disable it so that I dont accidentally right click the player and make it freeze. The Playlist loads fine so I could still use that.
And I apologize if I am a newb and just overlooked an option.


Thanks
Crackity

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

How about this:

go to preferences -> settings -> media loading
where it says "determine file lengths" try selecting "on play"

hope this helps :)

[crackity]

OK guess it would have made sense to say what I have tried :P

I have switched media loading to load track length on play

Currently in Quicktrcks,
only things checked are show album names, and sort by artist album track and seperate popup for both artistand album. Havent really changed these because I think the other options are pointless for that many songs.

Also out of curiousity, would playing with rows/cols affect anything? I have tried from a small 2 col setup all the way up to completely covering my dual monitors with the quicktrack list. Managed to do this with a smaller directory and I would have t osay it was very cool

RMI thanks for the reply though

[T_Dogg]

I wish you could just disable quick track, cause I dont use it and it slows everyhitng down when you right click in the taskbar and stuff, especailly when youve got a ton of songs loaded.

[Paul]

I wish you could just disable quick track, cause I dont use it and it slows everyhitng down when you right click in the taskbar and stuff, especailly when youve got a ton of songs loaded.
QuickTrack doesn't affect the speed of the taskbar menu unless you open the QuickTrack item.

[acozz]

The new playlist loading speed fixes cripple Quicktrack's usefullness because the majority of song tag info isn't loaded. I think it might be a catch 22 at this point.

[hedge]

The new playlist loading speed fixes cripple Quicktrack's usefullness because the majority of song tag info isn't loaded. I think it might be a catch 22 at this point.
I think a database is required... what some may call a media library....

[acozz]

I think a database is required... what some may call a media library....

I was going to say that but I didn't want to beat it into the ground.

[crackity]

OK after playing around with making a plugin that does QuickTrack for WinAmp (Sorry have done plugins before for them so it just came easiest) which I mainly did just to see how all of this works, I ran into the same type of problem as QCD was having with playing all of my music.

It almost looks like it is running out of resource space for menus or something.

I was using the Playlist to get the songs for my version but switched to the media library as that is more how QCD does it. If I am understanding correctly, QT does not do any mp3 tag stuff, just waits for the library/playlist thingy to resolve the file before QT shows it correctly (instead of Unknown)

Anyways I think I found a way around this resource issue by using the search feature in the media library.

Only create the top-level menu and make all the submenus for that popup be the same blank HMENU. When the user tries to expand a selection, see what the user had selected, use searching capabilities to get the requested info and create that submenu on the fly. Thus the most resouces that is stored is the main popup + (# of levels of subemnus) This is feasable and somewhat working (pre-alpha type thing here) for me with my plugin in winamp

Currently I have 23000+ songs in my library and surprisingly the time it takes for the menu to appear is more then acceptable (about 2 seconds for all the artists --which could be a one time thing if checking was done to see if the list has changed -- and less then a second for each submenu).

I dont know if this is completely feasable or what for QCD, just thowing out what I had to do to get the QT type features to work for me.

Also if anyone knows what this resource barrier is that I am hitting (seems to be an OS wide thing beacuse QT will affect all other popups) that would be interesting to know)

(Or if someone whats to help me figure out right menu popups on top of popups :P)

Also why limit the persons choices on what subemnus go where. Wouldnt it be possible to have the user create a submenu tree and tell what each level should be from a list of options for things including genre and bitrate for example. Then I could go genre->artist->etc etc etc Of course this would make the gui more complicated then it is now and I forget how "smart" some people are

oh and did I say add an option to disable it :P