Better Jukebox Software for Bigger Libraries?

jimjenkins1975 asks: "I recently ripped and encoded my entire CD and Vinyl library, as well as merged my home and work computer's libraries (I work at a music company so my work library is very very large). It resulted in well over 750 GB of MP3's. I was hoping to get away with using iTunes to manage this, however the XML database file has grown very large, and the application itself is non-responsive or very sluggish at best, once it has loaded up (a process that takes several minutes itself). Is there another application (preferably for Mac, but I do have a PC) with similar features out there that can handle a library of this size with aplomb?"

Comments

Quod Libet, of course

[keitosama]

Quod Libet is a fantastic GTK+-based music player designed for gigantic libraries. There are so many ways to search in it (for instance, you could search for &(genre=pop, genre=rock, #(lastplayed > 30 days)) to find every pop rock song you haven't been listening to for the last month, if you've got the tags right), so finding the tracks you're looking for shouldn't ever be a problem either.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[bhima]

You know the exact same can be said of iTunes. I have about 350GB and have noticed a slowdown myself but when it was 150GB I saw no speed problems at all. 750GB is a lot of data, no matter what kind of data it is... I'd hate to use my old G4 cube to deal with an music library that large.

So I think the real answer lies along the lines of what would a database pro do if his application got so big it started to slow down on his existing hardware?

Answer: Buy more, better, and faster hardware.

MySQL and mpg321

[ajs318]

What's wrong with MySQL and MPG321? As in

$ for SONG in `echo "SELECT full_path FROM songs WHERE group LIKE 'kylie%' | mysql music"`; do mpg321 $SONG; done

Same for video?

[LordSnooty]

Has anyone come across something similar for video? I've seen videodb but that seems more geared to DVD. I want something that will catalogue all my downloaded xvid so I can tell straight away if I had a particular title, instead of hunting through a stack of discs. Hashing or fingerprinting them files in some way would also be good, so I can start to share my collection with other people.

Imagine this: set up a torrent tracker, get your members to catalogue their video collection, combine that into one list of all available video, then if someone wants a particular file, the tracker will be able to ask all members with that file to start seeding.

Re:mpg123

[ajs318]

That's the way I did it too -- all directories are named for groups, within which are subdirectories for albums. I even built a CGI-based front end so I could play tracks with a web-based interface. It turned out to be less useful in practice just because I was running the machine without a display. My TV set has RGB inputs (and I know how to generate csync from hsync and vsync) but I'm not sure the machine's onboard graphics will run down to 15kHz.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[LWATCDR]

"750GB is a lot of data,"
It is but itunes should be dealing with a tiny fraction of this.
An MP3 might be three or for megabytes is size. The tag information should be far less than one kilobyte and probably a quarter of that. So let's say that he has 100,000 songs. So at one kilobyte per song runs to a grand total of 100 megabytes of data and 100,000 records in the database. That isn't a big database at all. I have one that I run on an old 300 Mhz P2 using Postgres that has over 400,000 records in a single table. Look uptime for any record is under .1 second using an indexed search of course.
SQLite would handle it with NO problem. Heck a good Xbase system could deal with it.
The problem with Itunes sounds like XML addiction. I swear people think of XML as the perfect tool for every problem. An XML flat file sucks as a database. Itunes is probably reading it all into memory to parse the file which will most likely cause a thrash unless you have a lot of memory free.
It is a fine solution for small datasets but as people here have found it really starts fall apart once the data set gets too big.
I haven't gotten into yet but SQLite looks like a great solution for many programs that need some type of data storage but don't need the complexity of a full blown database.

Do you like all that music?

[teridon]

Honest question here, because I am puzzled. Do you actually like all that music? I have about 40GB of music, but I only listen to about 12 GB of that with any regularity. All the other music I have just isn't that good, and I haven't gotten around to deleting it from my hard drive.

I very rarely find new music that I actually like -- so I'm puzzled when I hear that someone has a 750GB music collection!

Am I just too picky? :)