Is WMC Music Search any Good?

Triangle

Hi,
I'm going setting up a media centre in my house and am wondering if the music search facility in it is any good?
I have had encounters with previous systems where the search facility would take 1 hour to get to the artists begining with 'M' as they only showed 4 per screen with a pause of 5 - 8 secs between screens. And where you could not just skip to the M listings.
Does it show more that 10 items in a page/how long would it take to page down/and can you skip to any letter you wish?

Thanks in advance,
Trig

SouperComputer

In MCE, its pretty muck IME. Maybe others have been more positive.

That said, it doesnt take an hour to find the airtists, more like 20secs or so. Still, too long for my liking

mathias

Depends on how you set it up , if its done correctly ( and by correctly I mean the way microsoft likes it ) then its pretty fast and updates on the fly as you type in the letters to search.

I have almost 3000 albums on there and have a list up pretty much as soon as I finish typing.

The " correct" way , is one folder to an album , no deep subfolders , for instance I find its very slow if you have an artist folder , then sub folders for albums.
( I have each album setup in one folder using album name only , the artist info is in the MP3 tags anyway and comes up on screen , there is no need for an Artist folder in the heirarchy)

Also the album cover art has a maximum size , exceeding this will make the search facilities crawl , and all you MP3 tags should be done the same , again having some with different tag formats slows the whole show down.

Anyway , hope this helps

Triangle

Thanks for the replys lads,
I think i'll reorganise the heirarchy into one folder/album and check it out.
Hopefully it'll be nice and fast since I don't have near 3000 Albums
Trig

BaZmO*

mathias wrote:

Also the album cover art has a maximum size , exceeding this will make the search facilities crawl

What is that size?

mathias

Its not supposed to be bigger than 200 x 200 pixels , certainly no more than a few Kbytes in size , I have none bigger than 50K.

If you use Mbyte size images it will slow the search function down a lot. I know this because I scanned a lot of the images for my CDs and used them.
After some really extreme slowdowns I resized em all and that fixed things up.

hshortt

Turn on the indexing service which will help with any queries on the system. The artist search on MCE is not the best in my opinion. A better option would be to choose a letter corresponding to the artist and drill down that way.

Cheerio
Howard