Having problems with subsonic...

[Phredd]

I'm new to subsonic (new as in I installed it 2 days ago), and am having some problems.

First off, the left pane was not showing any information after I had set up my music directory. I have a feeling that this is due to one of my files has kanji characters as part of the filename and artist. I moved that file (and about 8,000 others) out of the music directory, and the file list now shows fine.

The major problem I'm having though, is that my search index isn't working properly. I manually run a search index rebuild, and it's eating up 100% of my quad-core processor, and has been for the last 12+ hours. From posts I've seen, this should only take a couple of minutes or so, and not hours upon hours. I only have around 20k music files, which is nowhere near the numbers I've seen other people mention. I've found some logs, but I'm not exactly sure which one(s) I should be looking at.

I should probably mention that I can navigate through the list of artists and view albums from the left pane, but categories on the Home page are all empty.

Any helpful hints or guidance would be most appreciated.

-Phredd, who's *really* liking the ability to listen to his music collection while at work.

[kdid]

Things that make indexing take a long time:
- If the music files is on a different machine than the Subsonic server.
- If the music files have not been indexed before.
- If the music files have the info tags placed last in the files. I found retagging files using MediaMonkey really help speeding up Subsonic indexing since it seems to move the info tags to a location that is faster to read. You will probably see that MediaMonkey uses quite a bit time to update the tags the first time to a file, but later changes goes much faster.

I try to break my music collection into smaller groups and I then add each group separately to Subsonic. That gives me the possibility to easier chose which subgroups I index when I have a problems with indexing taking too long.

As mentioned above. I really belive there is no good way to skip retagging of files with MediaMokey or similar program, because the next time you are to index your files, it probably will take longer than it do with properly tagged music files.

I will not guarantee that all the above is true, but at least that is my experience with the matter.

I myself have around 58000 songs and the indexing takes around one or two minutes. Then I have all my files on the same machine as Subsonic. I also have another machine with Subsonic that uses exactly the same files over a network connection. That one takes many times longer to do the index.

[Phredd]

- Files are all on the same machine as the subsonic server, so that's not the problem.
- Music files have not been indexed before (trying to get them going for the first time), so that could be a contributing cause.
- I've just recently found the glory that is Media Monkey, so I'm not exactly sure how to retag everything. I'll see if I can figure it out, but in the meanwhile, if someone knows off-hand, please let me know.

I've heard people mention breaking up their music into smaller groups, but what exactly do you mean? I have all of my music located at D:\Music\<Artist>, so would I need a separate group for each artist? Right now I have D:|Music set as my Music Folder in Subsonic. I would *very* much prefer to have all of my music in one directory, so rearranging my directory structure is very unappealing to me.

Since 58,000 songs take 1 to 2 minutes, having 20,000 songs taking 12-15 hours seems a little excessive. Does anyone have any idea how long a first time scan should take?

I don't know if this is related or not, but....

I stopped and restarted the subsonic server, and now for random albums, I have a list of 5 albums (same 5 every time I click "More", but different order), even though set number of albums per page is higher. These albums seem to be the first 5 alphabetical albums I have.

There are 6 albums that show up in "Newest", the 5 random ones, and one other.

Nothing shows up under highest rated.

Stuff that was listened to yesterday show up under Most Frequently Played and Most Recently Played.

I have a feeling that the random, newest, and highest rated are hardly showing anything is because the search index is having problems, but I can't say for certain. Ideas or suggestions?

-Phredd, who's had the same problem using both 3.7 and 3.8Beta.

[kdid]

To speed up tag location in your music files I propose to do it like this. First add all your music to MediaMonkey internal database:

1. Open MediaMonkey.
2. Select Files->Add/Rescan Tracks Into The Library... option.
3. Select the root folder of your music and press the OK button.
4. Wait until MediaMonkey have finished. You see a progressbar near the status bar.

Now do the actual adjustment of tags to force MediaMonkey to write the track again with a optimally placed tags section. (I admit I do not know how MM is doing this, but I have seen the speed difference as a result.):

1. Click on Artist & Album Artist in the left column.
2. Multiselect say 30 songs from the top of the list. You do that by first clicking on the first entry, then hold SHIFT key and click on the last one you want to select.
3. Right click on one of the selected track and select Properties.
4. Now the idea is to make change to one of the tags in the info tags on all selected tracks. - Since you do not want to alter a usefull one, I suggest to go to the Classification tab and select the Custom 5 box. Type in something in the box. Like TESTING. Then press the OK button at the bottom.
5. In the status bar at the bottom you will see a counter saying N tracks to be tagged. Wait to it reaches 0 and disappears.
6. Repeat step 3, 4 and 5, but remove the text you typed in. - See that this time it did the job much faster.

When you have tested this a bit like above and is brave, you can select all your tracks using CTRL+A, then repeat step 3, 4, 5 and 6 above to speed up the tag info on all your tracks.

As long as you only change one unsignificant tag, only that tag will be altered in all tracks. This is the quick way to speed up the tag info. I have done something similar myself by going through all my tags and corrected spelling on them and used the Tools/Auto Organize Files... option to correct artist/album and track names to make it look good in Subsonic.

[Phredd]

Tried the above steps, and re-ran the search index. After a week of it running, I finally stopped the service, and the same albums were the only ones to show.

It doesn't appear that the indexing is running slow, but getting hung on something. I removed the next group/album in the list (which was 3OH!3), and it got one album further than before.

Any other suggestions as to what could be causing this?

-Phredd, who's almost given up hope.

[flacflac]

Tried the above steps, and re-ran the search index. After a week of it running, I finally stopped the service, and the same albums were the only ones to show.

It doesn't appear that the indexing is running slow, but getting hung on something. I removed the next group/album in the list (which was 3OH!3), and it got one album further than before.

Any other suggestions as to what could be causing this?

-Phredd, who's almost given up hope.

A log would be helpful.