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+--- Thread: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files (/showthread.php?tid=279748)
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VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - theotg - 2016-06-14
Hi all,
My music library is shared also to a few Windows machines where I maintain m3u files for various playback options.
Some of those lists contains thousands of tracks, up to almost 20,000 of them. When loading them on my openelec 6.0.3 machine, loading time may take a few minutes, and that's a powerful Haswell machine with lots of free memory. My guess is that it loads all the ID3 tags upon loading, which makes it a lot of loading to do, but I may be mistaken here. Any idea on how to fix the loading time?
Thanks a lot!
Oren
My photography site: http://oren.thesarids.net
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - peppe_sr - 2016-06-14
if you are using file mode as you wrote in other post all is slowly with large music collections.
iicrc kodi doesn't cache infos in file mode.
Peppe
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - theotg - 2016-06-14
So what? Is there no way to load the info upon playing a song, instead of all of it in advance? Even good old Winamp had it...
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - nickr - 2016-06-14
Don't use file mode then...
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - theotg - 2016-06-14
Sorry... That's a bad answer. Really?
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - nickr - 2016-06-15
The point of library view is so that scanning doesn't have to take place every time you enter a directory.
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - theotg - 2016-06-15
But in that mode I can't see my m3u files that I so carefully maintain for other computers. So it doesn't help me.
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - nickr - 2016-06-15
I see, so the m3u's don't show up in the library? I see the problem then.
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - theotg - 2016-06-15
Not sure if they do or not, but even if they do, with the diversity of my list, I can't just scroll down something like 1000 times to find them...
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - HomerJau - 2016-06-15
I have playlists for my music concerts (video) where each concert is broken into individual files for each song. I named some of my m3u playlists with a preceding digit (e.g. 01. Acoustic Guitars, 02. my Favourites etc) so they show up at the top of the list of playlist. The concert playlists are named after the Artist - Concert so they follow in alphabetical order.
All the video playlists reside in the 'Mixed' playlist userdata folder where Kodi finds them ('music' playlist userdata folder for audio playlists).
BTW. Why do you have playlists with thousands of songs, how do you navigate to something?
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - DaveBlake - 2016-06-15
@theotg assuming your music files are tagged why not have a look at what the Kodi music library can do? I know that is a completely different approach to what you think you want to do, but Kodi simply isn't designed to present 20,000 playlists of 1000 songs each in an effective way.
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - theotg - 2016-06-15
Hi,
You got me wrong. I have only a few playlists (something like 10), based on music types and/or origin. Each of those playlists (written in m3u format) include a few hundreds to a few tens of thousands of tracks. Those m3u files are created on a different Windows machine and are used on any machine in my network.
Since they are highly maintained, I don't want to double the effort and those are the lists I usually play in my living room through Kodi. But, since they are huge, Kodi takes up to 5 minutes to load them which is frustrating. I am looking for a way to play those lists without the penalty of the huge loading time, and without recreating something different for Kodi (or inside Kodi).
Thanks,
Oren
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - DaveBlake - 2016-06-15
Oren sorry to say that with the current design Kodi is just going to be slow loading a playlist of "a few tens of thousands of tracks". It can be seen as a flaw, and for similar reasons the songs node (without filtering) can be slow to display on a large music collection. The redesign needed to chance the approach Kodi takes is not going to happen overnight, and is not something I am currently looking at, although someone else could if they have the skills and time. Oh and implement something that doesn't break anything else - the joys of open source!
So I understand your frustration, but all I can suggest is to at least try the music library. Persoanlly I would find a playlist with a few tens of thousands of tracks pretty hard to use and manage, meanwhile the library with smart playlists etc. gives me lots of flexibility to play what I want when I want. If your lists are rule based then Kodi can apply them.
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - peppe_sr - 2016-06-15
Oren, but you want to play randomly,shuffle mode, the content of your playlists or you need to open a playlist and browse tracks?
RE: VERY slow loading time for large m3u files - DaveBlake - 2016-06-15
Good point Peppe, party mode does not load all first, so would be quicker if that is how you want to use your playlists.