I get that yes, I do like the covers in the album list but it is a lot of overhead for low power devices and as js is single threaded that's a lot of work for a low to mid-range mobile processor. Also I'm guessing this would be comparable to a Pi if rendering the UI locally on an attached touchscreen.
I had a proper look at this today and found that you already have the UI.tagViewCovers property in place in playerlib.js so it looks like this is waiting for an option in the UI's library settings or something, there is a comment that this has been considered.
I've compared between having UI.tagViewCovers set to true and false and it can make a big difference, not only with the loading time of the tag view but the responsiveness of finger scrolling the album list long after everything is rendered. The downside is that it currently seems to break the quickscroll letters to the right of the album column.
To test I used the slowest device I normally use to control Moode which is only a couple of years old and is still on sale, an Android tablet with a quad-core 1.4GHz CPU each test was started using the Samsung Internet browser based on Chromium after nginx was restarted and all browser data deleted, the collection is currently over 84000 tracks and mpd reports about 7900 albums.
UI.tagViewCovers = true;
Initial page load = 24 seconds
Switching back to tag view from folder view = 6 seconds
Unfiltering after selecting a genre = 14 seconds
UI.tagViewCovers = false;
Initial page load = 13 seconds
Switching back to tag view from folder view = 3 seconds
Unfiltering after selecting a genre = 4 seconds
As I said, not a huge issue for me normally as this tablet just sits there 24/7 running the moode interface and BubbleUPnP so everything is cached normally and somewhat quicker than the above tests but this seems to be a reoccurring complaint. Hope you consider adding a UI toggle as a future enhancement, if I figure it out in an acceptable way maybe I can send you a pr on github?
I had a proper look at this today and found that you already have the UI.tagViewCovers property in place in playerlib.js so it looks like this is waiting for an option in the UI's library settings or something, there is a comment that this has been considered.
I've compared between having UI.tagViewCovers set to true and false and it can make a big difference, not only with the loading time of the tag view but the responsiveness of finger scrolling the album list long after everything is rendered. The downside is that it currently seems to break the quickscroll letters to the right of the album column.
To test I used the slowest device I normally use to control Moode which is only a couple of years old and is still on sale, an Android tablet with a quad-core 1.4GHz CPU each test was started using the Samsung Internet browser based on Chromium after nginx was restarted and all browser data deleted, the collection is currently over 84000 tracks and mpd reports about 7900 albums.
UI.tagViewCovers = true;
Initial page load = 24 seconds
Switching back to tag view from folder view = 6 seconds
Unfiltering after selecting a genre = 14 seconds
UI.tagViewCovers = false;
Initial page load = 13 seconds
Switching back to tag view from folder view = 3 seconds
Unfiltering after selecting a genre = 4 seconds
As I said, not a huge issue for me normally as this tablet just sits there 24/7 running the moode interface and BubbleUPnP so everything is cached normally and somewhat quicker than the above tests but this seems to be a reoccurring complaint. Hope you consider adding a UI toggle as a future enhancement, if I figure it out in an acceptable way maybe I can send you a pr on github?
