I have an HP ex495 that houses my music collection. I have a Win7 HTPC I built where the music 'library' is pointing to the WHS Music folder.

When I access 'Music' on the HTPC via Media Center, it's incredibly slow. We're talking about 30 to 60 seconds to simply view the list of songs, and just as long to 'play' a playlist. Skipping to the 'next' song takes 5 to 15 seconds as well.

My WHS has Twonky, but I was told that WMC can't work with streaming audio, just Windows Media Player.

Any ideas on performance? Any way to index it better? Any way to receive streaming in WMC?

To clarify, the network is sitting on a DIR-655 router connected via cables (not wireless, gigabit ethernet). The HTPC has a 2.2GHz CPU & 6GB RAM.

Perusing through my movies or other folders has never been a problem. I have been extensively using MediaBrowser & other addon's in WMC w/o fail. My only issue is 7MC's audio player is insanely slow to navigate & play. I have let it sit overnight where it does all the indexing & what have you, but it's still crazy slow.

I'm afraid I haven't got a solution for you, just another data point. I store my music on a WHS also, but the performance of the Music library on 7MC is perfectly acceptable for me (unlike the Picture library, where performance is abysmal). I don't use Twonky, just the WMC that is built into WHS. I've tried a couple of versions of Twonky in the past, and didn't like it. I also don't have a Gigabit network, just plain old Ethernet.

Perhaps you could try out accessing the media via WMC as an experiment to see if that makes a difference? 

Well I am even worse I run homeplugs, and the performance of the music library is ok as far as thimbnails are concerned. The picture gallery is worthless, takes forever to show thumbnails or display an individual image. I clocked 3 seconds for each picture. And the pic is about 2 mb in size. I copy data at about 5 MB/sec

 Local is best... but what is the WHS for :)

Streaming video and HD material is perfect, just a half sec delay in the start. I wish they could use more caching, for recorded tv thumbnails as well.

 /Henrik

Turns out that I was using CAT5 cables and trying to run gigabit ethernet... not a good idea. I fixed that recently with CAT6e and haven't fooled with it enough to see what a difference it made. I did notice that throughput for files copied from the WHS server is now hitting 40 - 80 MBytes/sec where before it used to hover around 20 to 30.

Another thing about my music is that there are several hundred MP3's in the default directory of the music folder, not to mention probably 500 - 1000 thousand folders (about 70 gigs of music + album art total). This probably doesn't help. I need to put all those songs into their respective folders and not clutter it up with MP3's being in the root music directory.