hello i did search but found nothing and after 3 pages or waiting for this forum i gave up.

So

1. How big is your collection (amount of tracks / how many gig's)

2. What bit rate

3.How does MCE / Media player preform when managing your library.

4. Spec of machine (only include if you feel relevent, i dont want this to become my spec list thread)

Mine.....(nearly forgot :hehe

1. 15.77GB / 2798 tracks (finally finished ripping my collection to music drive)

2. 192 or 128 if downloaded from msn music.

3. Media player is ok once running, can slow sometimes when scrolling and the machine is doing other things.  I belive Media Player 11 will improve performance. And features (but thats another post)

4. Machine

Windows XP Pro (yes i know mot MCE yet , i will get to it)

AMD Athlon 1800XP

512mb

Maxtor ATA /SATA HDD's

----------

Now i am expecting some one to come along and say they have 200GB + of music or larger and i can't wait to ask them , how the hell did you manage that??? lol 

Cheers

Oh come on guys 74 views and no posts/reply's.

I have really not begun to use MCE as a music library. A PC in another part of the house runs Itunes and most of library is in AAC format on that machine and on a storage drive on the network. I believe from casual reading there are various ways to convert and/or make your Apple purchased music appear in MCE I have just not taken the time to do it.

On the MCE machine I have maybe 60 tracks, taking up a small amount of storage.

The spec of the machine is a new Sony Vaio that I basically installed a new hard drive on with MCE OEM, added the tuner card PVR 150 MCE, a new graphics card, sonic encoders and away you go. Its a P4 3.2 I believe with 1.5 GB of Ram and about 500 GB of storage

I do not own a decent home theatre system with speakers, perhaps when i buy that I will get more interested in music over MCE. Once I get the XBox 360 extender, that will motivate me to put a better sound system on my main TV that the 360 will be on. The MCE system at present has a nice Creative speaker system and only outputs to its own flat panel and a 21 inch CRT TV but thats in the bedroom.

 

 

 

 

Hi RB 1,

My statistics are similar to yours but I hope the following is of some use:

1. 276 albums (3883 tracks, 22.08 GB)
2. 192 - as all music is ripped from my personal collection
3. In Media Player - instant. In Media Center it takes 20 to 30 seconds as I have it in album view showing the art.
4. See my signature

Kind Regards

Hi,

1. 4252 tracks, 20.22 GB

2. mix of 128 and 192, I'd say two-thirds 128, one-third 192

3. Performance is great.  When going to "My Music" after starting the Media Center app for the first time, I see the busy icon (rotating circle in the middle of the screen) for about one second.  When going back to "My Music" after this first time, the busy icon is there only a fraction of a second.  It doesn't matter if I view the library by artist, album, or song, it's always quick.

4. Running MCE 2005, rollup 2.  Processor is Althon 64 3000+, 1 GB RAM, 250 MB IDE Western Digital drive.  I have only one drive but it is in two partitions, and I keep the operating system in the first, and all the media content in the second.  Motherboard is Asus A8N-E, which has been very stable, and wake from standby/go back to sleep works well--and once you replace the 40mm chipset fan with something quieter, it's not so loud.

Have you tried looking at the task manager while opening your library--maybe then you could see if the processor was being taxed heavily during your operations, or if it was some other bottleneck.

1. 14052 tracks over 61.96GB
2. mix between 56 and 320 (mailny 192/128)

3. performance aint great as tags dont show up correctly,(work fine in itunes). also takes ages to load library up

so i just use itunes instead

athlon 64bit 3000+ MCE2005 rollup 2 1gb ram

1. 18,215 tracks

2. 128K

3. Performace stinks; ages waiting around the whole time.

3.4GHz P4 1Gb RAM so shouldn't e a problem. iTunes runs great!

1. 44 Albums, ~ 900 tracks.
2. Downloaded music varies between 128k and 300k+, ripped music is all 160k.
3. Performance: Poor. I always have my view on albums showing the covers. When loading "My Music" for the first time since last reboot, it takes about 10 - 15 seconds before the rotating icon goes away. When loading it a second time since last reboot, it takes about 0 - 2 seconds.
4. 3.0 Ghz P4 with HyperThreading, 512MB PC3200 RAM, 250GB SATA HDD

Overall, I'm not impressed with the performance of the "My Music" section. This is something that Microsoft should definately work in in the next version. Other than that slow load performance though, I like everything else about "My Music". I think the only thing I would ask for is a better way to create/manage playlists.

1. About 15,000 tracks/ 80 GB or so
2. All between 128 and 320 (some higher and audiobooks lower)
3. Performance - Not too bad seeing as how I have all the media stored on a seperate computer and pull it across the network via 11g USB wireless adapter.
4. 3.2 GHz P4 / 1GB RAM / SB Live! sound using digital out to my Yamaha digital coax in (awesome sound!)

I do not use my MC for TV or even have a tuner card because I have a Tivo for that. I use it to play ripped videos and MP3s, and to display pics on TV. I have a 57" rear projection TV so it delivers an awesome picture for these things.

I really think MCE should cache the list of albums and tracks rather than have to pull them across the network each time you want to access them.

1. About 25000 tracks, 570GB
2. All lossless
3. Performance 'ok' after moving the Media Player database to a ramdrive
4. 3GHz, 1GB RAM, SB Audigy4

Performance 'ok' after moving the Media Player database to a ramdrive


How do you go about doing this?

Thanks!

Check out this post

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=42&messageid=92007

 

~7000 tracks, plus an additional 3000 ripped in FLAC for my Squeezebox2 that MCE can't use.

Performance is poor, notwithstanding the response time, since I can't seem to get the tags right. Using the advanced tag editor in mediaplayer, I change the tags and they "forget" my changes a short time later even if I disable retrieval of additional information from the internet and I change the files to read-only right after I update the tags!!

I really want My Music to work properly, it's currently not even close to Foobar, Winamp, Itunes etc. in functionality, but does have the 10' interface going.

IMO, the current issues are:

1. tagging difficulties
2. album art issues including overwriting of manually entered folder.jpg file
3. slow response time
4. lack of support for FLAC

Microsoft are you listening?

2000+ tracks here at 320kbs MP3 with typical 20K front cover art inside and meta data.

Music split into folder for each artist. I dont use ALBUMS, every Album Name is the Artist name, and I have a generic 20KB jpeg for each artist (so this image shows for the ALBUM view in MCE). Each of the MP3's has its own jpeg inside to represent the single cover when released by CD/Vinyl. If this is missing the cover shown is the one inherited from the geneic jpeg in the folder with the MP3 files.

Used 320 to keep max quality - still deciding whether to change them all to MP4. I CAN tell the difference between 256 and 320 but then I have good system. 128 is just cardboard bass. The problem with AAC is that the cover art isnt shown (maybe the free codec I used) in MCE/Media Player but fine in iTunes. Jury out on WMA which is similar to AAC anyway, because the press reports say that WMA is good at low bit rates but inferior at the highest rates (192kbs)

Machine is 3GHZ P4 with 1GB PC3200 RAM and SATA150 16MB Cache Disk.

XP set for large system cache (see MS Support for reg key) and defragged disk.

Media Player 10.0.3955 (You can only get to this version from hotfix from MS Premier Support at this time)

Works fine, slight delay but nothing too bad or unacceptable.

 

bomba, for the performance issue, check my previous post, it really worked for me. Response time dropped from 60-70 sec to aprox 5 sec for opening my music in MCE.

For the media info retreival stuff, here's my settings (and it works perfectly)