Better Jukebox Software for Bigger Libraries? 118
jimjenkins1975 asks: "I recently ripped and encoded my entire CD and Vinyl library, as well as merged my home and work computer's libraries (I work at a music company so my work library is very very large). It resulted in well over 750 GB of MP3's. I was hoping to get away with using iTunes to manage this, however the XML database file has grown very large, and the application itself is non-responsive or very sluggish at best, once it has loaded up (a process that takes several minutes itself). Is there another application (preferably for Mac, but I do have a PC) with similar features out there that can handle a library of this size with aplomb?"
Amarok in Linux (Score:5, Informative)
There is a gnome equivalent [exaile.org] but it is not quite as stable. I can't speak for the MacOSX crowd, but when in Win32 (rare these days) I reluctantly choose to use Winamp.
Some tips from my experience:
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However, I have a 600GiB music library at my workplace sitting on an old PII 400MHz using Rhythmbox, and it seems to work just fine.
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Re:Amarok in Linux (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Amarok in Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why load 750GB of music into a database?
Or is PostgreSQL "just" used to store the catalog?
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It may not have all of your music files, but the ones it does it will make sure they are tagged properly, and it can move the files into a specific folder arrangement. If musicbrainz doesn't have those tags, well, upload them, and be safe in knowing that the tags will be available for your files, so even if they get screwed up, you can find them again.
Now, for managing something that big, something along the lines of Amarok is recommended, where it uses
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So I think the real answer lies along the lines of what would a database pro do if his application got so big it started to slow down on his existing hardware?
Answer: Buy more, better, and faster hardware.
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A "database pro" would look for unoptimized queries and missing indexes and speed up the database on the current hardware. As a matter of fact, most "database pros" work in environments where commissioning new hardware takes 6 months or so and goes through some ridiculous approval processes, so that's actually the hard option.
Daniel
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Anyone who's got "well over 750 gigs" of music needs to look at the hardware they manage the library wit
Re:Amarok in Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who designs lots and lots of database application, managing nearly 30 years worth of engineering data, as my full time job... I'd be looking for a new job pretty quick if my solution to every performance slowdown was to just throw more hardware at it.
If your saying: How can I get iTunes to run faster then yes, throwing more hardware might be the answer but that's only because you don't have access to the actual code that runs it... there isn't much of anything you can do about it. Chances are when friends and family ask for help getting things to run faster "buy faster hardware" is the only thing a DBA would have to offer because they didn't build any of the applications in question.
Though, you posed the question as if someone was building an new application from scratch, or at least had the ability to modify an existing application, in which case any DBA worth hiring would look for ways to optimize their queries. Nevermind the fact that iTunes uses XML to manage it's data as opposed to a more conventional database.
Sometimes better hardware is the answer, but it's never the first one you go to. More often then not in the business world you're required to build your application within the constrains of existing hardware.
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Interesting idea, I hope the original poster comes back with some specs on the hardware he is currently using. If it is a G4 era mac (or even a mac mini), the first suggestion of getting a MacPro ... or even better, contact apple's business support division and
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I have a MacPro and an iTunes library of around 80,000 songs and I can tell you that iTunes gets bogged down at times. I support more RAM would help.
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I've wound up with Highpoint RAID (with external drives) with my PowerMac. A very unsatisfactory solution.
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Same hardware, same data, just a better method of access.
I think that Apple may actually be w
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Oh, you were comparing it to SQLite. Sorry. Point taken
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Oh, you were comparing it to SQLite. Sorry. Point taken
Yes. MySQL is a total POS and SQLite is an excellent choice for small, embedded systems.
Like managing an album catalogs.
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The catalog for all that data only comes out to about 100MB, and I would put the total mp3 size (back of the envelope) at around 900GB.
For applications that do not need remote socket connections and can keep
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It is but itunes should be dealing with a tiny fraction of this.
An MP3 might be three or for megabytes is size. The tag information should be far less than one kilobyte and probably a quarter of that. So let's say that he has 100,000 songs. So at one kilobyte per song runs to a grand total of 100 megabytes of data and 100,000 records in the database. That isn't a big database at all. I have one that I run on an old 300 Mhz P2 using Postgres that has over 400,000 records in a single
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(does that count as Godwinning??).
The beauty of spending all your time getting the MP3 tags right and the
album art and lyrics *embedded* into the tags is that
someday, guaranteed, you are going to have to move
from one media organiser to another. Amarok wont always be
the killer app and some other smart organiser will take its place.
If you're tag data is good, that switch will be trivial. If, like
itunes, it stores some data in a DB rather than tags, y
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The trick is to get the t
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However it turns out you can "convince" itunes to use ID3 for artwork
with a clever trick [onetipaday.com]
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How would you get locked in by storing song metadata in SQLite?
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ID3 version 2 : http://www.id3.org/ID3v2Easy [id3.org]
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Back to the topic, Foobar2000 [foobar2000.org] for Windows handles crazy big music libraries with no slowdowns, and is extremely customisable.
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Haven't tried Amarok on Ubuntu, I don't like Gnome.
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There is a gnome equivalent but it is not quite as stable. I can't speak for the MacOSX crowd, but when in Win32 (rare these days) I reluctantly choose to use Winamp.
I've been
Mediamonkey (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm sure most
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this guy has 750GB. Being in the music industry, I assume he may have everything encoded higher than 192kbit (he sounds like he may be an audiophile), but I still find it safe to assume that he's got at least 100,000 files in his music library.
Personally, even though I've got 40,000 tracks, I really only *like* about 3000. My iPod's got all the music that I'm either trying to get into, was into recen
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technically, yeah.
I've got a friend who's got a nice 2TB RAID in his personal fileserver (mostly filled with pr0n, movies and music). He's a big stickler with the quality of his files and everything is either Flac, aiff, or 320kbit mp3s; he accepts no other formats. The problem is that when he wants to transfer his stuff onto his portable player, he's got to re-encode to lower-quality mp3s to fit enough music on the p
So you've used Mediamonkey?? (Score:2)
I'm not the questioner but this is a bugbear of mine.
I haven't used this software. However, when I ask a question about software I'm looking for answers from people who are knowledgeable about the subject. I can google, but just because manufacturers claim it works for 50k files doesn't mean it does
Media Monkey (Score:3, Informative)
The only other thing I can suggest is just using the filesystem to organise your music.
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No, really, I'd like to read up on what you reproach the definitively ultimate best media player ever...
Maybe you didn't use it like I did? I had the MMD3 skin, activated only the iPod and Local Files support, didn't install anything else at first (then I needed input plugins, found them all easy on the official site).
So I had an iTunes-like browser, a window-shade line with the player and the playlist - mmd3 in horizontal winshade mode has a drawer for the EQ - and th
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Quod Libet, of course (Score:3, Interesting)
Mmm, pop rocks... (Score:2, Funny)
Mmm, pop rocks...
amaroK (Score:5, Informative)
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Amarok again, but with some tips (Score:5, Informative)
MPD (Score:1)
VLC? (Score:1)
Im pretty sure theres a Mac version, so why dont you go check it out [videolan.org]?
-Red
mpg123 (Score:5, Insightful)
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I see drawbacks to that approach:
I have used mpg123 (well, madplay) and found it so impractical that I ended up
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Are you programmer? (Score:2)
If you programmer, you can try to find some simple DB tool a-la M$ Access or KDE's Kexi.
Once you would put meta data along with file names into database, rest would be pretty easy. You can also implement something simple to convert track selection (SQL query) to play list and add button to launch external player on the play list.
Though I'm not sure about state of DB software on Macs.
www.foobar2000org (Score:2, Informative)
The tagging and conversion features are unsurpassed and it's still nimble even with a collection that size. I don't use it for actual playback, for that I use mpd on my linux box.
hth
well over 750 GB of MP3's (Score:5, Funny)
WinAMP (Score:1)
I'm even thinking it could run in Wine, so that I'd finally have a usable music player and manager on Linux : I tried Rhytmbox, it sucks (scans my whole library EVERY startup. Can't deactivate that) so does Banshee (same problems, almost-same interface), and I'd rather run Windows programs than install anything KDE on a GNOME desktop.
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Anyway, if you're looking for a good GTK jukebox (and yes, Rhythmbox totally blows), check out gmusicbrowser. [squentin.free.fr] Excellent browser, can use gstreamer or mpg321/ogg123/flac123 or mplayer as a backend, very adaptable interface, snappy as hell with my 80GB or so (mixed bag of flac/ogg/mp3), I can't speak for how
External HD (Score:2)
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Be an ID3 tag-nazi - No player can compensate for 750 GB of badly named media. MP3Tag [mp3tag.de] is your friend for batch editing ID3 tags.
Sort all your files using a reasonable naming system. I use '/path/to/archive/%Artist%/%Year %Album%/%02Track% - %Title%.%Ext%'. This comes in real handy for writing scripts to deal with an archive to large to manage by hand.
Backup. Backup. Backup.
Amarok - Potential Problems (Score:2, Informative)
Slimserver supposedly scales that high (Score:3, Informative)
At work I have done the other thing people mention, which is attempted to rigorously organize the directory structure my MP3s are stored in, and then used good old xmms to play directly from the filesystem. I see other people talking about amarok but every time I have attempted to use it it's very unstable for me. (My collection is about 80G and it never seems to make it through scanning it.) Is the secret to backend it into mysql instead of letting it do sqllite? Or maybe it's artsd that is problematic? Would anyone like to share their Amarok best practices?
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Specs:
AMD Duron 900MHz
3 x 250GB EIDE - {ALL MUZIC}
1 x 250GB SATA2 - {Systems Partition}
640 MB RAM
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MusikCube (Score:3, Informative)
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foobar2000 (Score:3, Informative)
Windows only unfortunately, though it is supposed to work well in Wine. Significant chunks of it are BSD licensed.
MySQL and mpg321 (Score:2, Interesting)
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Same for video? (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine this: set up a torrent tracker, get your members to catalogue their video collection, combine that into one list of all available video, then if someone wants a particular file, the tracker will be able to ask all members with that file to start seeding.
I have my own software (Score:1)
it uses excel file to set up a pointer and info database...
this contains the artist and all their mp3s....how it works is, the program creates a hyperlink within my application on the intro page( which lists all the artist and # mp3 and sizes)
By clicking the hyperlink on the intro page for that artist you to go to their page(worksheet),
once there...you have a hyperlink created for each mp3 that when you click on opens the def
Brave Brave man (Score:2)
I can see the dollar signs in these thieves eyes now.
Merged home and work libraries? (Score:1)
Sigh.
SubSonic (Score:1)
Slow Mac? (Score:2)
Running Mac OS X with 512MB is painful, 1GB is the minimum for a responsive system, 2GB and more for power-users. With the size of your music library, I'm guessing you have less than 2GB.
I could be wrong of course, but that's the first thing I would check.
iTunes FYI (Score:3, Informative)
iTunes doesn't use the XML to store its library - the XML is there purely to be used by *other* applications. iTunes keeps its library in its own proprietary format, similar to the format of the iTunesDB file on iPods, which is completely binary in nature, and muuuch smaller than the XML spat out :)
I like iTunes because of the COM object, mainly. I wrote a script that uses MusicBrainz to tag my music in iTunes automatically, getting Amazon artwork for that missed by the iTunes Music Store (and embedding downloaded artwork for those with only the downloaded variety, which iTunes doesn't like putting in MP3s on its own).
If I could find an application that allowed media management just as good as iTunes, with the playback features, artwork shits, etc. then I'd jump ship in a second. Especially if it had a SQL back-end. dirty. :)
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XMMS2 + MusicBrainz Picard (Score:2, Informative)
One of my requirements is the ability to add an SMB share directly to the media player's library, as my entire music collection is stored on a media server (Maxtor MSS Plus) and accessible via an SMB share. Amarok is unable to add an SMB share directly to its Collection, and requiring root access to mount an SMB share is just stupid, IMHO. Rhythmbox is capable of using GNOME's solution to
Winamp 5x (Score:3, Informative)
http://mr2.phpwerx.net/Photos/Sully/stuff/full/w inamp.png
I can go to "Audio" which shows me all of my tracks, or I can go to "Classic Rock" or "Rock" which contain smaller amounts of music, and load a bit faster. Also plays nice with my iPod, including album art.
Do you like all that music? (Score:3, Interesting)
I very rarely find new music that I actually like -- so I'm puzzled when I hear that someone has a 750GB music collection!
Am I just too picky?
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I can only assume that several of the people posting in this topic do DJ work, where having every audio file a customer could possibly want is a huge plus. My friend, an amateur DJ, and I worked an 80-person party this weekend, and it was still pretty decent working out of a 50GB library. It goes a long way to keeping the music interesting and the guests satisfied.
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Windows Media Player (Score:2)
DigitalDJ (Score:1)
Which size matters? (Score:1)
Depends on how you want to interface (Score:1)