I did set it up as a static char (not a const) but I didn't set it as readonly. I'll double check everything.
Clicking on the album cover within the 3DBee window currently doesn't do anything unless you have mouse scrolling enabled. If that's enabled you can click and drag the covers to make them scroll. It's a bit glitchy though and enabling that setting hides the scrollbar. But there is nothing in place to interact with musicbee yet.
I have plans to add more interaction with music bee. So clicking on an album might change the file list to display all the songs on that album. And add context menu items so you can click on a cover and add that album to the queue.
Initially it was just going to be a visual thing for my partner as I transitioned her away from iTunes and she missed Cover Flow. I said I would try and find a replacement and here we are. She didn't actually use it for anything, she just liked seeing the covers there and have them flip around. So replacing that was my main focus. But I will keep working on adding more functionality.
Starting with v1.2 and continuing with 1.3, there is an increased use of RAM and drive activity.
I'm not sure what could have happened there. My system is using less RAM than it did in version 1.0 but It is quite a small library.
If you have "Load all covers into memory" unchecked, the only other setting that will effect memory is Album Buffer.
This is basically how it works. When you select an album it has an index number and this is what happens (simplified)
All covers in the range of index - nbLeftAlbum and index + nbRightAlbum are read from the HDD and loaded into RAM.
These covers are loaded into GPU memory and then cleared from RAM. Garbage collection decides when to free up that RAM but it should be pretty quick.
Any albums outside the range above plus the album buffer (half left of index and half right of index) value are removed from GPU memory.
And that cycle just repeats constantly as the flow moves around. A few seconds after the flow stops, all CPU activity should stop and any used ram should free up after a few seconds. The garbage collection can be finicky sometimes and doesn't always free up RAM on a regular basis but it gets there in the end.
The other issue that I need to improve is when you edit tag info. Currently this will cause 3DBee to reload everything which is particularly bad if you have a large library and "load all covers into memory" enabled. There is probably a better way to deal with this but if the user changes the album name 3DBee will crap itself if it doesn't reload as I think it causes the UniqueAlbumID to be changed and the old one doesn't exist anymore.
I'd suggest disabling 3DBee if you are planning on making a lot of changes. But if you have "load all covers into memory" disabled it shouldn't cause that much trouble. It will only reload the images near the currently selected album as detailed above.
How much ram usage are we talking about?