Xfmedia -- random play large collections

[Brian J. Tarricone]

i'm not really sure what you mean - xfmedia doesn't sort files at all.  
when it starts playing in shuffle mode, it picks a random number between 
0 and (num_playlist_entries - 1), and plays whichever number comes up.  
it also maintains a bytemap the size of the number of playlist entries 
to keep track of what it's already played in the current shuffle.  the 
only slow part is that GtkListStore is implemented as a doubly-linked 
list with head and tail pointers, so it's possible if it has to find an 
entry in the middle of the list, it could take a while, since it has to 
iterate either forward from the beginning, or backwards from the end.  i 
can't see how this could take several minutes, though.  with just under 
5000 tracks in my playlist, it never takes more than 100ms or so to 
start a new track when the previous one finishes.  at any rate, the only 
thing that matters here is the number of tracks; total size is pretty 
irrelevant.

so, the fact that it's using virtually no CPU, and not in some 
RAM-consuming loop leads me to believe there's something else at fault.  
what version of libxine are you using?  is the GUI still responsive 
throughout this?  if the GUI *is* responsive, it's likely a problem with 
libxine, as the hangup must be in another thread (xfmedia itself is 
single-threaded, xine works in the other threads).  please try to 
reproduce this with the latest version of libxine (1.0 final).

if you can, try running xfmedia through gdb, and ctrl+c while it's 
sitting there.  get a backtrace *of all threads* to see what it's doing.

    -brian

aec wrote:

>Hello 
>
>I am using Xfmedia on debian sid with the os-cillation.de packages. My
>music collection is relatively large I suppose, over 80gb and grows by
>around 10gb per month. 
>
>One thing I like about Xfmedia is that it loads my full collection 
>in a few minutes, xmms will do that too but much slower and beep
>sometimes crashes, rythmbox always crashes loading that many files.  
>
>The only problem is sorting, if i choose random play, Xfmedia takes 
>a very long time to sort the files, as of yet I have never had the
>patience to see exactly how long it takes and closed the app after 5
>or 6 minutes of waiting. (I will try later to time this if it would
>help)
>
>While waiting, I did look at free and top , both cpu (p4 3.0gz) and
>ram (2gb) were hardly being used, so that isnt a problem, its not
>locking up anything thankfully which makes this a minor issue at best.
>
>Xmms does not have this problem and randomizes my playlist in under a
>minute. I am just wondering if there is something I could do to make 
>Xfmedia handle random sorts on large collections.
>
>I should say some people have told me not to load that many files,
>asking a media player to load 80gb is unreasonable, to which my reply
>is usually along the lines of why not? :)
>
>Anyhow, this is not complaint, I love xfmedia, but just a heads up
>on the "large file list" issue.
>
>
>
>  
>