Decibel Audio Player

Caching File Explorer/Library meta-data on harddisk

Asked by Markus Voge

Hi!

I also have my problems with the File Explorer's habit to scan folders in order to distinguish between media/non-media (see https://answers.launchpad.net/decibel-audio-player/+question/50249). The reason is that I am using a large music archive with more than 800 folders in its root directory. So, when I open up DAP, it always takes ~3-5 minutes until the whole root directory has been scanned, lagging the usability of the player.

My suggestion to solve this is: Either implement an option to allow DAP to store the meta-data in a specified file on the disk, so that it doesn't have to be reloaded each time on start-up (which of course needs to include an ability to update this in case of changes, either automatically or manually). The other idea would be to allow the user to switch off the scanning for media/non-media files so that they don't have to wait until the folder was scanned when they want to open it. However, I haven't looked into the code yet and don't know if it would be feasible or not.

DAP is great in many aspects. However, there are quite a few points that appear not optimal to me. I don't know what you think about it as developer. Maybe you want to keep it as slender as possible, but I think there are some features which could improve usability a lot.

I would offer my help on this. I have a little experience in programming, however I never contributed to a larger piece of software, so please be aware that it might take me some time.

Cheers, Markus

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Best Anonym25712 (anonym25712) said : 		#1

Hi,

Which version are you using? Recent versions of DAP no longer distinguish between media/non-media folders, and let you drag'n'drop any directory to the playlist.

Revision history for this message
Markus Voge (sgrubsmyon) said : 		#2

Hi,

I am using DAP version 1.00. I am currently on Ubuntu Karmic and installed from the repo, thus it is package decibel-audio-player_1.00-2_all.deb that is installed. This is the standard package for Karmic. I saw that for upcoming Lucid, it will be version 1.02.

I now removed the 1.00 package and installed the 1.03 .deb package from the DAP home page Downloads. It's now not scanning anymore, start-up seems to be even faster and it's an overall (even) smoother experience. Thanks for that change. I also saw that DAP now has an equalizer and ReplayGain capability (or did I miss it on 1.00)! These are great features. Now, if decibel-audio-player-remote had a fast-forward/reverse function, DAP would be nearly perfect for me.

Revision history for this message
Markus Voge (sgrubsmyon) said : 		#3

Thanks François Ingelrest, that solved my question.