Decibel takes forever to load songs from ext drive

[sjc]

When I first open Decibel it takes probably a good ten minutes before any music shows up in the player. I have my Mac Mini connected to a G Technologies drive via Firewire 800. Granted I have a little over 1TB of FLAC files on the G Tech drive but is it normal for Decibel to take this long to load the music?

[plexus]

Same here. initially I was force quitting and restarting and not seeing my library. then i decided to let it beach ball and see what happens on quit. it will eventually quit fine and then when i restart the app it spin down in the lower left corner and eventually my library will show up. so it seems that it just takes a very long time to save out my library and load it back in. my library is quite large. other player apps don't take nearly as long to load and some are instantaneous so this is something the dev could take a look at and resolve. i have 13661 tracks in my library and it will only get larger.

[plexus]

ok this is weird (but good): i just quit Decibel. i restarted my mac. my music is on an external hard drive that i need to unlock with a password (Western Digital Unlocker). I started Decibel before I unlocked the drive, this means the actual drive volume with the music was not mounted. Decidel started up within a couple of seconds with my entire library. then I unlocked and mounted the drive and its working. i will experiment more later, right now listing to music.

[bfn]

Same here. initially I was force quitting and restarting and not seeing my library. then i decided to let it beach ball and see what happens on quit. it will eventually quit fine and then when i restart the app it spin down in the lower left corner and eventually my library will show up. so it seems that it just takes a very long time to save out my library and load it back in. my library is quite large. other player apps don't take nearly as long to load and some are instantaneous so this is something the dev could take a look at and resolve. i have 13661 tracks in my library and it will only get larger.

This is why Decibel urgently needs an integrated music library manager. With its predecessor Play, I was able to keep all my tracks loaded and yet, restarting only took a few seconds, since it only had to refer to its own little database instead of reading the actual files. With Decibel, it will now take me about 60 minutes to load all my tracks. So, I tell it not to remember the files at restart and always add just a few tracks by dragging them manually from my folder structure onto its window. I would love to use Decibel's ability to sort and search my complete list of music tracks. Still waiting for that library manager to be implemented.

[daikan]

looks like I start to understand why you want so much library function
before Decibel I used foobar on windows and clementine on os x - they are both had integrated lib, but when I start to use Decibel without it function - it was not comfortable at the begining but I quickly got used and now it doesn't call any difficulties. I have huge lib too - around 190 gb's of mp3's and 120-130 of flac's. all music are ordered by the genres in separate folders.

[sjc]

So what is the reason that Decibel takes so long to load? It doesn't have a library manager feature? I mainly listen to my music library through my PC running Foobar2000 (which I think works great BTW) and using a High Resolution Technologies Streamer II+ DAC to connect to my audio system so I don't use Decibel a lot but I would like to understand the issues I'm having with Decibel.

Thank you to all that replied.

[sbooth]

You're right- the reason Decibel takes a long time to load when a large number of tracks are in the playlist is that it reads the metadata for every track from the source file. The new version I'm working on has a library manager and starts up very quickly.

[maya]

You're right- the reason Decibel takes a long time to load when a large number of tracks are in the playlist is that it reads the metadata for every track from the source file. The new version I'm working on has a library manager and starts up very quickly.

This is great news! Any idea when we would see it released, even as a beta?

[sjc]

Thank you for your efforts on the new version. I do enjoy the sound quality from Decibel when I listen through my Mac Mini and will look forward to the new release.