Help Slow Music Player

[Smileyguy3000]

Other threads say that adding mp3 files to the phone shouldn't slow it down. I have only 1gb of songs on the int memory - and the music player seems to take a good 20-30 seconds to read & list what's there every time I start it.

is this normal?

 

[mrqs]

it's normal that it takes a while, what isn't normal is that it's doing it every time

 

[informale]

As far as I know, the system scans for new media (mp3s, images, what have you) every time you disconnect your phone from your computer (or technically, every time you unmount and then mount back internal/external SD card) - so media is not scanned when you start the player. So I suppose, the slowness cannot be caused by player indexing the media.

However, perhaps the player's way to handle large databases is simply inefficiently implemented.

Anyhow, I don't use the player at all, so let's hear people who also keep large music libraries on their phones.

 

[Rastaman-FB]

i have 1.5 gig of music on internal memory and 6.5 gig of music on external memory.
it only ever does a rescan of all the music if i disconnect from mass storage or reboot the device.
I used it as my main player for travel as i commute to work on public transport alot rather than drive.

the behaviour is the same for both 1.6 and 1.5 although 1.6 is not as loud

 

[Snazzy]

i have 1.5 gig of music on internal memory and 6.5 gig of music on external memory.
it only ever does a rescan of all the music if i disconnect from mass storage or reboot the device.
I used it as my main player for travel as i commute to work on public transport alot rather than drive.

the behaviour is the same for both 1.6 and 1.5 although 1.6 is not as loud

I have about the same config as Rastaman and I have the same issues. Ideally it should not have to re-index or rebuild gallery thumbnails after each boot but it does. Is this a Galaxy bug/annoyance or is it Android's? Is this fixed in 2.1?

 

[Rastaman-FB]

I have about the same config as Rastaman and I have the same issues. Ideally it should not have to re-index or rebuild gallery thumbnails after each boot but it does. Is this a Galaxy bug/annoyance or is it Android's? Is this fixed in 2.1?

its not a bug or a problem really. nokias do it and it used to take about an hour if you added new music lol
it re-mounts the partisions when you disconnect the device or reboot so it does a rescan for changes. i believe linux kernels does this by design
infact windows does it, have you ever wondered why sometimes you browse my music after about 30mins of not doing anything it redraws all the thumbnails?

so our behaviour is by design in android, but the op says its doing it for every time he starts "IT"
now im guessing hes meaning "it" as the whole phone and not just the music app/music

 

[Snazzy]

i believe linux kernels does this by design
infact windows does it, have you ever wondered why sometimes you browse my music after about 30mins of not doing anything it redraws all the thumbnails?

so our behaviour is by design in android, but the op says its doing it for every time he starts "IT"
now im guessing hes meaning "it" as the whole phone and not just the music app/music

I cannot comment about Linux but Windows does a great job of keeping an index and creating persistent thumbs that survive a reboot. I have not noticed Windows having to create all new thumb nails after 30 minutes, the existing thumbs.db file gets appended on the fly but not recreated. Saying these setting are lost "by design" is just poor design.

 

[Rastaman-FB]

i see it all the time in windows regardless of thumbs db.
its not the recreation, its the pause of access while it looks for updates
you see it more on machines with green drives and lots of files.
computers are also massively faster than a mobile phone so the process is not as noticeable and in cases seamless.
whether or not you beleave its poor design or not is up to you, you have to compromise otherwise the device wouldnt work at all
the application draw recaches after every restart aswell. if everything was cached there would be no room.

 

[Snazzy]

i see it all the time in windows regardless of thumbs db.
its not the recreation, its the pause of access while it looks for updates
you see it more on machines with green drives and lots of files.
computers are also massively faster than a mobile phone so the process is not as noticeable and in cases seamless.
whether or not you beleave its poor design or not is up to you, you have to compromise otherwise the device wouldnt work at all
the application draw recaches after every restart aswell. if everything was cached there would be no room.

But thumbs.db survives a reboot whereas the Android version of thumbs.db(sorry I don't know the file) does not appear to and needs to be recreated from scratch.

The android media system; pictures, videos and music is broken or poorly designed or the OS is not capable of doing a proper job with media. Waiting 5 minutes to view a picture because of thumb creation evertime I open the gallery after a reboot is wrong. I love Android but clearly the gallery is poor.

 

[Rastaman-FB]

indeed but dealing with ltd space, ltd memory and ltd hardware capabilities there has to be some trade offs

 

[mrqs]

i gotta agree with snazzy here - the limited hardware argument is totally moot

a media tag database doesn't take up shit; a html file list (generated from winamp) of my 8000 mp3s is 380k in size - that's a tad over 50 gigs worth of music
add to that some grouping and more metadata and call it a mega - still hardly worth mentioning (remember you can't even fit this amount of mp3s on the phone); plus you can reduce that size to under 35% by zipping it

now obviously the talk was more about thumbnails, which of course take up a bit more space
like 10 kilos a piece
that's 10k per album art
so to take those 8000 mp3s and for simplicity's sake say there's a thousand albums (8 tracks per album)
that's 10 megs, plus the 1 meg of the database, making up a total of 11 megs worth out of 50 gigs - you'd rather sacrifice performance than just over 0,2‰ of your mp3 storage?

as for the gallery - again, we've got approx. 10 kilos for each thumbnail
a picture taken with the galaxy's camera is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1 to 1.5 megs - let's call it 1
that's a 10k addition to each 1 meg picture, racking up a simply massive 1% increase in sd card storage usage per picture!
oh, how could i ever sacrifice that for a smoother gallery?

 

[Rastaman-FB]

indeed but its not mp3/sdcard storage it uses, im only guessing but im pretty sure its using the internal memory which is 1gig for everything including system, recovery images, apps and the apps db's which is why people run out of internal space when they still have 6 gig left on sdcard which they believe is part of their internal space

eitherway its not galaxy, its android and its by design. im sure by now it would have been sorted if google deemed it a big problem unless there is a valid reason for this.
someone with more knowledge about Android would be able to shed more light into it than me. as most of my argument is down to assumption as to why the cache is burned at reboot

 

[mrqs]

indeed but its not mp3/sdcard storage it uses, im only guessing but im pretty sure its using the internal memory which is 1gig for everything including system, recovery images, apps and the apps db's which is why people run out of internal space when they still have 6 gig left on sdcard which they believe is part of their internal space

eitherway its not galaxy, its android and its by design

which would make it bad design, like snazzy mentioned

im sure by now it would have been sorted if google deemed it a big problem unless there is a valid reason for this.
someone with more knowledge about Android would be able to shed more light into it than me. as most of my argument is down to assumption as to why the cache is burned at reboot

yeah, i'm not convinced you're right about all this (i haven't got a clue) - i mean it sounds totally plausable, and it certainly looks like that's exactly what's going on, but i just can't think of a good reason why google would decide to do that

 

[Smileyguy3000]

Wow - sorry to cause so much fuss!

I think the dismounting from USB pointer makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Wasn't taking so long today because I wasn't fiddling around uploading and checking again.

I didn't notice the mounting/dismounting factor before . . .

 

[atbeyi]

I have got 3.5 Gigs of Music in internal sd and 2 Gigs in the external sd, i use meridian as the default player and sometimes cube (interesting 3 symbol we use to write 2 m3 "two cubic meters") and they don't do this indexing thing. meridian just indexes (using the phones indexing service) if i want it to do so.

 

[iNick]

Anyone knows an app that doesnt index songs like winamp in windows.
Simply add files that you want to listen, without indexing, connectig to internet for song data etc.

thx