Author Topic: So how big is your music library?  (Read 116519 times)

ma_t14

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 2493
MusicBee often gets complements about how well it manages huge music collections. That made me wonder, how big a "big" real life music collection is and how well is one managed with MusicBee?

What is it like in terms of performance (delays, responsiveness etc) to have a huge library. Post about your experiences, positive or negative and maybe compare to other music players as well if you can.

So let me start, my library is is pretty small, just barely under 5k of mostly 320k mp3s with a few albums in flac as well. I didn't notice much of a difference regarding performance across the music players I tried (probably because of the size of my library). MusicBee is generally very snappy in its operation for me but I expect that to not hold true for much larger libraries.
Last Edit: January 05, 2012, 01:02:38 AM by ma_t14

beeing good

  • Guest
22,018 tracks
185.64gb

I think the performance is pretty good. Sometimes it can seem a bit sluggish (start up and changing views etc) but I can't really compare to anything else, it's been quite a while since I used anything else and, to be honest, I would put up with a much worse performance from MB before I changed to something else.

I don't have any significant problems with it at all, it does exactly what I need it to. Sorry, not much of a critique here but I really am happy with it.

cartman005

  • Member
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 589
I don't think 5k is small, especially if you have taken the time to organize it well.

I have almost 9k at about 70BG and I consider it to be decent sized, especially considering all of the time spent tagging everything correctly and adding album art and ratings.  I just finished upgrading my music with iTunes Match so almost everything is 256kbps and the few classic albums that I decided to keep in flac (Beatles, Thriller, etc.).

I take pride in my library and I think I have a good mix. I try to listen to everything at least once through and I avoid having full albums just to have a complete library. I will only download one or two songs from an album if the rest is garbage. This way, I only have music that I will listen to.
Last Edit: January 04, 2012, 10:50:23 PM by cartman005

phred

  • Global Moderator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 9303
6,900 tracks at a touch over 42 gb.
The vast majority of it is MP3s at 256 or 320k.  There are some flac albums (mostly Beatles and Grateful Dead) and I'm slowly going through my CD collection and selecting some which I think will be better served (listened?) as flac. 

I see no slowdowns or performance hits with MusicBee.  I really have nothing to compare it with as I, like most of you, used a good number of players before discovering MB.  But I didn't put much time or effort into ripping my collection up until MB appeared.  It was just too much work.   So I had tracks ripped that I wanted to listen to on my computer and I didn't care much about tagging them with anything other than the title.  When I was in other rooms of the house, I listened to the CD.  Now, with the addition of two Squeezebox devices, I'm incredibly happy that I have been using MB since April of 2009 as my collection was (mostly) properly tagged and ready to play on the Squeezes.

And to that I have to give a tip of the ol' phred hat to Steven.  And to a good number of forum members who have offered suggestions, either directly by answering my questions, or by my reading what they were suggesting to someone else.  Thank you all!!
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

----------
The FAQ
The Wiki
Posting screenshots is here
Searching the forum with Google is  here

Maleko12

  • Member
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 658
32,663 tracks and 261.3GB in my main library.
495 tracks and 5 GB in my upcoming (AKA haven't listened to yet, or not properly tagged and organized yet) library.

The vast majority of my tracks are either VBR or 320kbps. I know that before I switched to MB iTunes was going slower at 20,000 tracks than MB does at 32,000+ tracks.

Anti

  • Member
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 952
5000 tracks @ 40Gb

I don't like how MB freezes completely whilst bulk processing files or tags. With mediamonkey I could continue doing stuff in it, even though it was tagging hundreds of files. I think I remember Steven saying that this would be addressed in the future, when MB comes out of beta and is 'finished'.

Also, I made a decision to keep all of my artwork to 300x300 @ 25kb. To me it seemed that MB stuttered a little and took longer to display when artwork was significantly larger (Eg 800x800 @ 75kb).

Apart from that, no problems at all.

Mikelap

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 113
Hi so far Musicbee has been very very  good to me  its fast and  simple thats what i was looking for in a player ,and if i have problems you guys have my back (you know who you are). My collection is up to 16,279 tunes which is all .flac and is 457,32 GB in size only 150GB left on drive. Rock on
PC Windows 10>Musicbee>Quad 405>Burson Conductor >Pioneer SX750>Woo Audio22>FLUXION AV-7 S.E.T. Speaker amp>FU32+6N2 AMP.>Asus Essence STX>CmoyBB>Sennheiser HD800S >Grado RS2E>DENON LA-D5000 LITE >DENON AHD-1001,Kef 104,Klipsch KG 5.5

Carbon6

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 54
43,000 songs (about 450 gig -+), and as quick as it was when it was just 10 tracks.  
I gave up with Winamp because the lib took too long to navigate after it got aver 30,000. It would sometimes take nearly 3 seconds to swap artist or select a different view, and it got annoying after a while.

MusicBee otoh, performs lightning fast. always.
The only downside is trying to get my friends to swap to MusicBee as well, as i drummed Winamp into them for years.

(would love a better VU meter though ;) )
Last Edit: January 05, 2012, 04:49:59 AM by Carbon6

Steven

  • Administrator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 34312
I think the performance is pretty good. Sometimes it can seem a bit sluggish (start up and changing views etc) but I can't really compare to anything else, it's been quite a while since I used anything else and, to be honest, I would put up with a much worse performance from MB before I changed to something else.
is it still sliggish changing view with the latest beta version? I made a change a couple of weeks ago which should have improved that if you had the artist profile panel displayed. If its still the same, how many seconds are you talking about?

I don't like how MB freezes completely whilst bulk processing files or tags. With mediamonkey I could continue doing stuff in it, even though it was tagging hundreds of files. I think I remember Steven saying that this would be addressed in the future, when MB comes out of beta and is 'finished'.

Also, I made a decision to keep all of my artwork to 300x300 @ 25kb. To me it seemed that MB stuttered a little and took longer to display when artwork was significantly larger (Eg 800x800 @ 75kb).
i will look at bulk tag editing at some point
for the artwork size that was addressed several beta releases ago and should no longer slow things down
Last Edit: January 05, 2012, 09:28:59 AM by Steven

greenday1987

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 627
  • Long live OiNK!
Mine's only 52GB. It used to be 100's of GBs but I've lost some HDDs and haven't replaced it. I just add what I want to nowadays. I rip CDs to flac using EAC and convert to V0. Most of what I download is V0 and all the music destined for MB is V0 pretty much. I don't listen to lossless but merely use it for archival purposes ie if I have flac then I can convert it to whatever I or someone else needs. MB handles my humble collection perfectly
*EDIT*
763 artists
597 albums
7,315 songs
52.37 GB (~ 813 hours
(according to SubSonic)
Last Edit: January 05, 2012, 12:55:03 PM by greenday1987
RIP OiNK


I've recently joined last.fm - http://www.last.fm/user/drjswho
Feel free to add me if you wish :)

EAC V1.0 beta 3 can be downloaded here
And a full guide on setting it up and ripping a CD can be here

boroda

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 4595
14500 tracks, 72 GB. Only VBR MP3s. No problems with MB performance.

ma_t14

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 2493
I can see many interesting posts. Keep them coming guys/gals  :)

beeing good

  • Guest
I think the performance is pretty good. Sometimes it can seem a bit sluggish (start up and changing views etc) but I can't really compare to anything else, it's been quite a while since I used anything else and, to be honest, I would put up with a much worse performance from MB before I changed to something else.
is it still sliggish changing view with the latest beta version? I made a change a couple of weeks ago which should have improved that if you had the artist profile panel displayed. If its still the same, how many seconds are you talking about?

Now you mention it (just tested it now), it does seem a lot better now with the latest beta. It was never slow as such, probably only a couple of seconds.

Analien

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 219

agoMiST

  • Guest
43,000

It takes less than 2 seconds to load up or refresh the main library browser  ;D

Back when I used MediaMonkey and had less files it took upwards of 15 seconds