HUGE music collection-Whats best option? Split over X amount of portable MBs?or?

[Turk]

As title, I own a massive collection of music having spent over a decade converting my CD's, Tapes & vinyl to FLAC.

Is there a solution to "help" Musicbee form being over whelmed and crashing and could it be installing multiple portable versions of MusicBee on each drive that contains the music? or will this clutter & cause  issues with their linked appdata files or will they remain "happily" independent?

I've tried so many apps and MusicBee is by far the player I prefer to use (I do use "quick access" apps like Boom, OceanAudio, VU Player etc for a quick n dirty album or track play but of course prefer (preferred until crashes occurred) to use MB for longer listening sessions.

Side note, I recently migrated a bloated 2TB harddrives content to a new 4TB drive and in doing so rearranged the drives letters - I then deleted the old playlist and reset monitored folders and rebuilt the playlist, ever since I've had issues.

Is there a way to save my players layout, installed add-ons etc but safely reset MusicBee without loosing the layout (which took days to decide upon). ?

or should I just reinstall completely? or run multiple Portable additions to handle portions of my library (via Genre seems the logical way forward) literally having 3 or 4 portable installs covering grouped genres ie Jazz, Funk, Soul, Blues, Funkadelic etc then another portable MB covering Punk, Rock, Psychedelia etc then another covering Reggae, Dub etc and so on??

or is there a practical way to still have TerraBytes of FLAC files running under 1 instal - maybe no playlist and just have it playing from monitored Locations (harddrives/folders)?

Could it simply be a case of running as admin or run elevated beyond "normal"?


I'm open to suggestions.




if the info is useful, I have 16GB of DDR4, i58600k (6core) and a 1070ti with O.S (Win 10) running from an M.2 + 8 internal drives. (no need to be specific about the (too many) external enclosed harddrives for back up).

The 8 internal drives are :- 6 SATAs to the motherboard & *2 reclaimed drives connected via pcie slot - these 2 are not monitored by Music Bee. Only the 3x4TB drives listed below.
3x4TBs Western Digital Blues for music @5400rpm,
1TB Western Digital Black (for games),
1x 2TB 7200RPM for "other Media" &
1xTB WD Blue for General "work"/storage,

+ *2 crappy scratch drives (ripped out of sky boxes) on a pcie card, 1st used to hold rip's in process of tagging etc the 2nd for downloads of apps & stuff so my "main" drives don't see much read/write busy work other than when accessed by an Audio player.

Dunno if that gives a useful picture.


TYI for any advice especially from those who have the same experience and found the "cure" of a large collection.

[frankz]

You don't need different installs, just separate libraries for each of the groupings you list.  All the same install / layout / etc.  File->Library->Open Library to switch between them.

I'm not sure why you think one library with it all (perhaps filters if you really want to separate them out) is a problem, though.  It shouldn't matter flac or MP3 the library itself doesn't care about that and a library (the library database itself) with 100,000 MP3s is going to be the same size as a library with 100,000 FLACs it's storing all of the same information.

If you don't need to monitor the folders with these files or scan them on start-up (I don't know why you would - it's just for convenience and can all be done manually when needed) then avoiding doing that would probably solve whatever problem you're having.  That's the only thing that I think would become more burdensome as a library grows and would be more intense for FLAC files than it would for MP3 files.  But you don't need that, and deciding to do manual file management is a heck of a lot more convenient solution than having all these libraries to manage would be.


But the answer to your question is to have multiple libraries under the same install.

[hiccup]

I'm open to suggestions.

Until now no limit has been reported to how large a library MusicBee is able to handle.
So for that matter one installation of MusicBee should suffice.

But, if I am reading into your situation correctly, I think I would suggest using two portable installs.
The first one where you just load everything into that you have.
It might be messy, but it's a starting point, and it will show everything you have, including all 'problematic' files that you will need to address. You can check them for tags, albumart, genres, etc.
Also it will allow you to test and learn settings and preferences for MusicBee that are important to you.

Then, for all albums/recordings that you have processed to your satisfaction, move them to another folder/drive that is managed by the second MusicBee (portable) installation.
So that folder/drive will now hold your cleaned-up music library, and it should also be a more stable MusicBee setup because of what you have learned from testing things on the first installation.

The second installation will easily handle all your files, and since the tags for the files should now be in order, allow for any kind of managing and filtering.

On a side note, personally I do have two portable installation these days for a different reason.
I have one for classical music, and one for non-classical music.
The reason for that is that there are a couple of essential differences between the two genres that became too tiresome for me to try combining in one setup comfortably.

Also I ran out of available custom tags to accommodate for both genres, and having two installs solved that for me too.
But for a library only containing non-classical music I see no good reasons for splitting things up.