UI and scanning performance with big library and dual SD cards?

[RECAR77]

Hi,

I'm currently using my phone with 65gb of music on the internal storage and 830gb on the sd card. ~85k songs.

I'm aware that this is a limitation of the SD card speed but the performance is in some aspects barely tolerable:

Full rescan=40min

search= ~3-5sec

editing a tag takes ~40s to take effect

picking a song from a search plays the song instantly but sometimes shows the "Doesn't look like anything to me" in the bottom (with "list item click action: play and stay in list" enabled) and when touched (or with "play and go to main UI") loads the play and skip button over the search list and then takes 20-40s for the cover and the rest of the UI to catch up. Controls in the status bar and playback still work perfectly. 

EDIT: It happens 100% of the time after I delete a track. 

I also have a feeling that those issues become worse/more common when I made changes to the library (add/delete/tag edit) but didn't do a full rescan afterwards.

But this isn't a rant. My actual question is: IF I were to get a DAP like the FiiO M11 that has dual SD and added another card would that get even worse or stay the same?

On one hand double the cards would mean double the bandwidth (at least in theory) but on the other I don't know how Poweramp would handle scanning and searching.

Any insight or experience is appreciated

 

[andrewilley]

I have ~7100 songs (around 60Gb) on my SD Card, and a Full Rescan takes a little under 2 minutes. With well over ten times that amount to scan I'm not surprised it takes a long time. Don't forget that a full rescan involves not only crawling the entire directory tree but also opening and reading from every music file to build the new database. It might help to make sure that only the folders which you are using are selected in Settings > Library > Music Folders, but that is still a huge amount of content to read.

If you added an extra SD Card with even more content, my I suspect it will take even longer as the separate cards will be read sequentially not concurrently, and it would also depend on how fast that specific device reads SD Card data anyway. The search speed would be down to the amount of entries in the database, and the speed of SQL access, and the more you add the longer it will take.

Are your cover images embedded in the songs by the way, or separate files/downloads?

I expect @maxmp can elaborate more, but my gut feeling is that adding any more content (even on separate cards) will only slow things down even further. A log of starting playback and viewing the UI might help Max work out where the lag is occurring and if there is any other way around it.

Andre

[RECAR77]

28 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

With well over ten times that amount to scan I'm not surprised it takes a long time. It might help to make sure that only the folders which you are using are selected in Settings > Library > Music Folders, but that is still a huge amount of content to read.

it would also depend on how fast that specific device reads SD Card data anyway. The search speed would be down to the amount of entries in the database, and the speed of SQL access, and the more you add the longer it will take.

Are your cover images embedded in the songs by the way, or separate files/downloads?

I expect @maxmp can elaborate more, but my gut feeling is that adding any more content (even on separate cards) will only slow things down even further. A log of starting playback and viewing the UI might help Max work out where the lag is occurring and if there is any other way around it.

Andre

The speed of the full scan isn't really an issue. if that takes >2h with 2tb, so be it. I'll just let that run over night whenever I change something.

I'm only scanning folders that have music in them (assuming that is what you meant)

but search speed would at worst grow linearly with increased storage/number of tracks?

as far as covers are concerned it is probably evenly split. what would be preferred here?

how would I capture and/or where is the log?

[andrewilley]

See what Max has to say first. But if you need to capture a log, first perform the task that is taking an unexpectedly long time (e.g. play a track and wait to see the artwork on screen) and then go to Settings > Support > Send Log and email the resulting details to gpmaxmpz at gmail.com.

Andre