How to manage a 100gb+ MP3 library and be... functional at all.

[kurek]

I've asked about this a year ago and decided to pick it back up again..   will try to be succinct:

I have a collection of MP3 music files I'd like to be able to play on a Moode device and each time I try it makes the device unusable.    I know this relates to the size of the collection because if I do the same stuff with a small folder for testing it always works well.

I have tried loading 100gb of music directly onto a 128gb microSD card with the Moode OS
I have tried LAN shared folders over ethernet and over wifi
I have tried USB thumb drives,  SSD,  USB HDD,  externally powered USB HDD
I have tried a Raspberry Pi 3B and a Raspberry Pi 3b+ 
I have tried the 64bit kernel

When I asked about this a year ago everyone said 100+gb collections are no problem... but as far as I can tell it's simply not usable for that.    So I gave up because I was getting nowhere.

Tried another stab at it today with a fresh install of the 7.x image on a new microsd card..  same result it's entirely unusable as soon as I ask it to play a library bigger than a couple albums. 

Can someone confirm that Moode on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ is even supposed to operate at all with mp3 collections that contain 15k+ files,   and if the answer is yes can you suggest what you think I might be doing wrong?

[vinnn]

My music collection's about 3.5TB (>100000 tracks) and moode's fine with that, however I usually use a tablet to run the web interface and control moode, also recently used Roon with Moode as the endpoint and sometimes use the MALP mpd client.

I'm guessing when you say you have a touchscreen that you're running the local display option on the Pi and thus the Pi is also running a web browser to render the web interface. When the web browser is rendering long lists, like when you create a 15000 track playlist for example, the web browser has to generate and display a lot of html and thus can be quite demanding on something like a Pi3. Moode's web ui can be quite demanding in general if the library is large and the browser is running on underpowered hardware.
The Pi3 is easily powerful enough to manage a mpd library of this size and perform audio playback in mpd and the other bundled renderers but might be sluggish at running the web interface in a local browser with a long playlist like this, also if your Pi is locking up completely (ie you can't access it from the network) it might be running out of memory running Chromium locally. There's been discussions on this forum about the bundled Chromium browser recently exhausting the memory on some Pis and the possible workarounds such as changing out chromium for firefox.

For the best experience you might want to look at accessing Moode's web ui from a mobile device like a tablet or phone which should be quicker than a Pi also you don't have to get out of your seat to control moode then. Otherwise try to avoid going to the now playing sceen when a massive playlist is loaded.

[the_bertrum]

When you say "ask it to play a bigger library" do you mean you are asking moOde to make a playlist of ALL your music and play it? If so, no it won't work, the playlist would consume all the memory on list that size. Also if so, why? It would take years to play through all that music.

[kurek]

For the best experience you might want to look at accessing Moode's web ui from a mobile device like a tablet or phone which should be quicker than a Pi you also you don't have to get out of your seat to control moode then. Otherwise try to avoid going to the now playing sceen when a massive playlist is loaded.

I forgot to mention, some of the previous attempts at this have been with (either of) the Raspberry Pi's in a different, non-display enclosure and strictly through the web UI. But I think I got the answer anyway that it's not necessarily about the library size but about the playlist size which in my desired case is "all of it" .

When you say "ask it to play a bigger library" do you mean you are asking moOde to make a playlist of ALL your music and play it? If so, no it won't work, the playlist would consume all the memory on list that size. Also if so, why? It would take years to play through all that music.

Oh yeah I was (and wish to continue) doing everything in a single playlist and hit random all. It's work from home background music and the less repetitive it can be the better. I hadn't considered the playlist itself would be a problem since winamp on windows has handled playlists this size on 300mhz pentium chips so I considered it not really a big deal. Don't know what goes on under the hood differently. So that means my better option for a whole-library playlist is to dust off an old laptop, download winamp and use that.

Thanks for the confirmation about where I'm running into a bottleneck, saves me from spending more time troubleshooting

Cheers

[vinnn]

You don't need to stick your whole library into a playlist for random play, enable auto shuffle which is in the moode menu, Configure > Audio Config > MPD Options > Auto Shuffle.

[kurek]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that, doesn't a song have to be in the playlist in the first place in order to play?

[Tim Curtis]

Auto-shuffle automatically queues up a randomly selected track from the music collection, starts it playing and then when the tracks completes, deletes it and then queues up another randomly selected track. Auto-shuffle also maintains 2 tracks in the Queue to facilitate crossfade.

With Auto-shuffle the Queue grows by at most 2 tracks. You can also specify whether to randomly play tracks or albums.

More details are in the ( I ) help for the feature.