radish Wrote: > Careful. You're getting very close to calling the (largely volunteer) > developers lazy, which they patently are not. >
I'm not calling anyone lazy. I'm saying that, yes, doing a more thorough implementation of a feature can be significantly more resource and time intensive than doing a fairly basic implementation, and it's not always worth it -- but in this case, I think it is worth it. (Yes, I'm highly biased, in that it's someone else's time and my usage that we're talking about, but I think this is more generally true.) > > I'd take the time to read up on the prior discussion of this issue. > From what I understand the slow down is ENTIRELY due to having to look > up meta data for each file, so the only way to speed things up is to > not do the lookup. Of course, as usual, if I'm wrong feel free to > submit a patch :) > Yes, I see the smiley, but I do want to point out that I'm not writing as a developer here, I'm writing as somebody who's paid $500 for various Squeezeboxen and is seeing a useful feature that I depend upon being weakened. (As a developer, I'd say: You've got a database, so this should be possible. If you create a special table to hold metadata when browsing folders, indexed on the folder name, just do one single query to retrieve all the metadata for all the files in that directory, and put it into a hash; then when looping over the items for display, pull the array of metadata out of the hash for the item you're displaying. If you have no hash, fall back to the generic file display. The hash lookup should have minimal performance impact, the single query per page load shouldn't be a major performance problem, and there's no loss of visibility, in terms of not seeing un-indexed files in the folder. But I have no idea how SlimServer is working underneath -- and no real time to find out -- so this may be impossible for a zillion reasons) > If I were you, I would focus on your key problem - that the existing By > Artist, By Title, By Album, etc, don't fit your needs. Given that all > meta data is now in a db it should be possible to allow users to define > their own browse criteria. I don't think that'd work, though. I don't have any metadata in the files listing whose music is whose -- that's just in the folder structure. Plus, I like to use conditional styles of browsing: For classical or pop music, I want Genre/Artist/Album, but for soundtracks, I want Genre/Album. I've got my folders set up that way, but I can't imagine how you'd special case a regular browse to treat some genres differently than others. If I'd never had Browse Folder available, I'd probably have set things up differently so that the other browse modes would work (abuse the Genre tag to have "Pop: Me" and "Pop: Wife"; set the Artist on all soundtracks to "Original Soundtrack" so there's no artist browsing necessary for them), but I did have it, and it's nice, and I don't want to lose it. -- mkozlows _______________________________________________ beta mailing list beta@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/beta
