Comments on: limitless playlist

Question: limitless playlist

NGnerd — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:12:34 -0800

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?

By: Inspector.Gadget

Inspector.Gadget — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:17:27 -0800

Foobar2000. Very stable, comes as bare-bones with a bunch of plugins included in the installer, many more are available.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:19:06 -0800

Amarok

By: NGnerd

NGnerd — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:21:29 -0800

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?

By: chrisamiller

chrisamiller — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:37:33 -0800

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.

By: squorch

squorch — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:50:28 -0800

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.

By: If only I had a penguin...

If only I had a penguin... — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:14:14 -0800

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.

By: Dee Xtrovert

Dee Xtrovert — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:17:03 -0800

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.

By: tracert

tracert — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:33:47 -0800

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.

By: Sufi

Sufi — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:38:43 -0800

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.

By: Inspector.Gadget

Inspector.Gadget — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:32:50 -0800

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

Thoroughly seconded.

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:07:07 -0800

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!

By: benzo8

benzo8 — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:44:33 -0800

Seconding the penguinless chap about me - MediaMonkey handles enormous MP3 collections with (relative) ease...

By: Nelson

Nelson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:33:45 -0800

Yeah, another recommendation for MediaMonkey. It's like iTunes only not awful.

By: NGnerd

NGnerd — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:27:32 -0800

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.