Another option worth considering would be to use a high speed compact flash card and a IDE to CF adapter instead of creating a volitile RAM drive. For no more than $50 US for a 512MB SanDisk Ultra II CF card or similar high speed card and $20 for the adapter you should see a significant increase in library load times, and have no worries of system crashes losing your library.

While I haven't tried this, (my collection's a mere 8000 songs, and I can wait the 10 seconds it takes) I have used a high speed CF card and a wonderful program called nLite for my carputer to get win XP loaded in 12 seconds from off, and have read about people using larger CF cards that leave hybernate enabled and can resume in 2 seconds!

Any thoughts?

How would you make this work?

While CF cards are nice for silent PCs, I think they are actually slower than a harddrive so the benefit wouldn't be the same as using a RAM disk.

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Vista Ultimate with TV Pack
Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz (OC'd to 2.9) / 4 Gigs Ram
c: 80 Gig d: 500 Gig SATA
Tuners: PVR-500 / HDHomeRun x 2 / WinTV 1600
Extenders: DMA-2200 / DMA-2100 x 2

Linksys V1 extender (for sale..anyone interested?)

My music files are stored on another computer on the network (not the MCE machine).  Would moving them to the MCE machine make the My Music pages load faster?  Right now it takes about 10 seconds to load 4000+ MP3's and their album covers.  I would consider adding another hard drive to my MCE machine strictly for music if it will help performance.  Has anyone else tried it both ways and what were the results?

do you have a screenshot of the string? i can't seem to get mine going...

I tried using Junction to link the default user's and all other users to a common "Media Player" folder in All Users and that worked fine until I tried to use the XBox extender.  What happened is that two processes can't open that file at the same time, So the extender can't open it when it is being used on the PC.  Copying the file to the extender worked great however.  This helped a lot because the extender can take forever trying to search and load music files on it's own.  It is faster to build this database on the MCE PC and then copy the database to the MCX account.

By the way.  The default user can be edited at under \documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\<etc>.  But I don't recommend you by default point all new users to the same database file for the reason stated above.

Hope this helps someone.

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--Doug

hey guys,

in response, i did use the enterprise version and it worked out pretty simple. it really takes the thought out of it and is totally transparent. I was wondering if some of you guys could roughly quantify the load speed improvement. maybe i was just expecting "instantanious" or i already don't remember how slow it used to be, but i'd kinda like to know what everyone else is seeing. I setup a 256m drive for a 150m database. i too have about 25000 tracks but mine are all vbr mp3s (though i don't know why the file type would matter). anyway, i know it's faster, but i never really timed it before. now it takes about 10 seconds for the little rotating arrow to stop doing it's thing and then the images seem to load pretty quickly after that. I guess i'm just not sure which times are limited by accessing the database and which are just the media player software loading images. it' seems that the images are never "all" loaded. when you skip around by letter, the images still have to populate. (i'm assuming this is more the software part and not the ram access part).

anywho, my specs are

2.8 p4 800fsb 512cache

1gb of super deluxe xms ram (-128 for video and -256 for ramdrive)

pundit-r

btw, i did specify no page file in the perf section...

 

edit*************

ok, i take it back, it does seem that eventually(seems to load them at a rate of about 4-5 images/sec), all of the images stay permanantly loaded. this leads me to think that it's just media player taking a long time to display everything even though the database is thouroughly accessible. don't get me wrong here, i think it's great even though the images aren't instantanious, at least i can read, play and access any of my music inabout 10 to 15 seconds. (though personally i think mmjb for xp(9 i believe) is substatially faster, just can't run it in mce)

 

one thing that i don't care for too much, is that it seems that everytime you back out of mymusic, it "unloads" the photos. is there anyway to keep these loaded?

Does anyone here have a handle on how media player functions with respect to loading like this? Or know of a good reference to the info that I could dig around in myself?

Nice trick! However; it IS possible to change the location of the MediaLibrary, so that one doesn't have to perform the risky actions with creating the symbolic link with junction.exe.

Just a small (undocumented, unsupported, own risk) registry modification; add a string in the registry to point to the/a new location.

locate: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences, add the string: 'LibraryDatabasePath' and point to the/a new loaction overhere, for example: f:/wmp 

Copy (or move) your current library, wmdb file from C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player,  into the specified folder. (A reboot is not even necessary).

EDIT: oops sorry, i just now read the whole post, saw that my solution was already mentioned, well twice is not that bad.......

Nice find!

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JuMz

Hiper HMC-1S53A Case
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This is great,

I want to ramdirve my xbox 360 database.  I'm using vista and found the database in c:\users\mcx1\appdata\local\microsoft\media player, but how do I modify the registry when its not the current user? I can't log in as mcx1 so I can't modify the registry for it?

hearcolor:

This is great,

I want to ramdirve my xbox 360 database.  I'm using vista and found the database in c:\users\mcx1\appdata\local\microsoft\media player, but how do I modify the registry when its not the current user? I can't log in as mcx1 so I can't modify the registry for it?

I doný have a Xbox myself, but isn't it enough to just 'share' the library?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/howto/mp11/sharemedia.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/knowledgecenter/mediaadvice/0102.mspx

Thanks, I've done that, but you're very limited to functionality also you have to mannually go to the media.  You can set up the 360 to boot to WMC automatically and they it looks just like a PC.   It's geat in that you can watch TV, listen to the radio,strem HD files, and pictures, of corse music too.  Only problem it that it totally bogs down when you have a lot of files.  When you use the 360 this way it creates a user account and database just like a normal user and you can't share databases either as explained above.

Does anybody know how to modify the registry for the mcx1 account?
 

Old thread but in case someone is searching for info I thought I'd point out that the recent update for Windows Vista KB951641 which came out around 10th October 2007, breaks this functionality.

Your library will appear empty and when you go to add locations to monitor they won't be remembered and WMP won't scan them.  Doesn't matter whether you use a junction or the librarydatabasepath registry entry to put your library on the ramdisk and the software you use for the ramdisk makes no difference either.   Interestingly, as soon as you put your database somewhere other than your ramdisk, functionality is restored.

Uninstalling the update isn't enough to fix it, I had to rollback to the restore point before the updates were installed and then re-installed all the updates except for this one.   My database now continues to work stored on my ramdisk and monitored locations are being remembered.

Hope that helps someone.

I decided to try using a high speed flash drive on usb 2 port instead of a RAMdisk:

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/permalink/233175/233175/ShowThread.aspx#233175

Seems to work pretty well too.