limitless playlist

January 21, 2009 7:12 PM

Let's say one where to have over 100,000 songs they wanted to play randomly from a playlist, if Winamp has a 90,000 song playlist limit (approximate) before it crashes; what other software would you suggest that would allow for such an immense list while not stealing all your resources (sorry itunes!)

So the idea of a terabyte gets me thinking, with an average 4mb song one could achieve over 100,000 songs on a drive...but how would you play them? Any large playlist folks out there have a suggestion?

posted by NGnerd to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Foobar2000. Very stable, comes as bare-bones with a bunch of plugins included in the installer, many more are available.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:17 PM on January 21 [2 favorites has favorites]

Amarok
posted by pompomtom at 7:19 PM on January 21

i've got foobar and find that it takes awhile to read each song; so if it takes about 2 seconds to read a song, your talking 200,000 seconds to read a full list ... or about 2.3 days to create the initial list (assuming it doesn't have to re-load the list everytime it opens, this could be a solution). Winamp has a nice feature in that it can be set to read the file location without reading the data, anybody know if foobar will do this?
posted by NGnerd at 7:21 PM on January 21

Write a simple script that runs nightly and chooses, say, 2 thousand filenames at random from your music directory. Output the list into an .m3u file and open it with any music player you like.
posted by chrisamiller at 7:37 PM on January 21 [1 favorite has favorites]

Seconding chrisamiller - break the problem into a more manageable one. Assuming an average length of 3 minutes, you only need about 30k songs for an entire day of non-stop music. Get a cron job going that makes the day's playlist and you should be set.
posted by squorch at 7:50 PM on January 21

I don't have nearly a terrabyte of music, but I use MediaMonkey, I love it, and according to this forum post, and this FAQ entry it has "no known limit" and is known to handle two terrabytes.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:14 PM on January 21

I have 100,000+ songs on iTunes, spread over four hard drives (all in a lossless format.) I've never had a single problem, and have never understood the anti-iTunes thing. (I do have a Mac.) My "party shuffle" is set to play anything with 3 stars or more, and it pulls from all my hard drives with no delays and goes forever (in theory.) It doesn't steal any resources to speak of - I'm not sure what you mean by that.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 8:17 PM on January 21

so if it takes about 2 seconds to read a song, your talking 200,000 seconds to read a full list ... or about 2.3 days to create the initial list (assuming it doesn't have to re-load the list everytime it opens, this could be a solution).

I just did a little test. On a 500 GB pretty standard hard drive, Foobar was able to index my 12 271 (92.2 GB) song collection in 2m 14s (on my fileserver with a RAID 5 made of the same disks, the same collection only took 1m 44s, but let's use the more common example). So that's about 91.57 songs/second, right? So we can estimate very unscientifically and probably incorrectly that 100 000 songs take maybe around like 1092 seconds, or 18.20 minutes to index, if that rate of indexing remains constant and Foobar doesn't die horribly when its database is subjected to that much load. Of course these numbers don't really mean anything given how many untold variables that I am not accounting for, but since this is a theoretical question, I'm giving a theoretical answer.

Anyway, since you wouldn't have to do this each time, just once per playlist, I find anywhere around 18 minutes to be not unreasonable. Although, I question the usability or need of a 100 000 song master playlist. Breaking it up into smaller bits makes a lot more sense to me if you were going to do something like this.

It doesn't steal any resources to speak of - I'm not sure what you mean by that.

iTunes is fat, bloated and very awful software on Windows.
posted by tracert at 8:33 PM on January 21

iTunes runs best on apple machines which is probably why you've had good experiences with it. On a PC, without an up-to-date machine you're going to notice a slowdown.

Try Songbird. It's very similar to iTunes but eats less resources.
posted by Sufi at 8:38 PM on January 21

iTunes is fat, bloated and very awful software on Windows.

Thoroughly seconded.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 9:32 PM on January 21

Doesn't winamp allow you to put multiple playlists on the queue? Could you break up your collection into three or four pieces and then put them each on the queue separately?

Or is it the queue that blows up at 90kSongs.

iTunes is fat, bloated and very awful software on Windows.

I doubt that it's intentionally this way, but I'm certain it's intentional that they don't care to fix it. After all, if a Mac runs iTunes that much better, it must be a better machine, right? Buy one!
posted by Netzapper at 3:07 AM on January 22

Seconding the penguinless chap about me - MediaMonkey handles enormous MP3 collections with (relative) ease...
posted by benzo8 at 4:44 AM on January 22

Yeah, another recommendation for MediaMonkey. It's like iTunes only not awful.
posted by Nelson at 6:33 AM on January 22

as it turns out, the initial list read time is dependent on the speed with which you are accessing the drive (duh!); therefore loading files from a USB hardrive goes much faster than a networked drive off of wifi (double duh...possibly a d'oh as well). Not that i can confirm it, but apparently foobar will load up 119,714 files, if one where to desire to do such a thing; However the initial load would take running overnight to load these files from a NAS drive over wifi. Thanks for all the help on this wonderfully theoretical problem. As for the rational of creating such a list, one can only guess at the insanity of human kind.
posted by NGnerd at 5:27 PM on January 22