[quote="nohitter151"][quote="dannyno"]

I want to be able to play music wherever I am in the house, with the mimimum of effort. [/quote]
That is exactly what UpnP (called Media sharing in MM) is for.[/quote]

Well, yes.

Now I've got my set up stabilised I shall be experimenting more with upnp.

[quote="dannyno"]

I want to be able to play music wherever I am in the house, with the mimimum of effort. [/quote]
That is exactly what UpnP (called Media sharing in MM) is for.

Thinking about it, would it be possible to bung the MM database on a USB stick or an SD card or something, and use that in order to maintain just one copy of the db file? (Obviously you'd want to backup frequently).

Or, indeed, could you create a portable installation of MM on a moveable memory device which would nevertheless point to music stored on a NAS?

Would that work? Or would that be impossibly slow or otherwise breakable and bad?

[quote="jiri"]Sure, we definitely try to please our users, even though it's sometimes hard as people have different requirements. As for MM4 - it added a lot of new features and also is faster than MM3 - when the DB is installed locally. While the networked DB is still supported, we can't guarantee the same performance as for the local DB. It isn't that we don't care, it's just that we are facing technical limits that don't look like resolvable. And, we believe that instead of shared DB, there are and will be better solutions.

Maybe it would help if the users who think that they require this kind of setup would describe their usage of MM, so that we better understand what needs to be implemented in the future versions, so that this problem is resolved for everyone.

Jiri[/quote]

I want to be able to play music wherever I am in the house, with the mimimum of effort.

I have all my music on a NAS (backed up!). I have a PC which is connected with a wire to the LAN, and a laptop which connects to the network wirelessly. I have a tablet which connects wirelessly, and then I have a mobile phone which also connects wirelessly. Most often, I'm playing music on my laptop or on my tablet. I will sometimes use the mobile phone to control what is playing. Sometimes I use apps (poweramp) on my tablet to play music on the NAS, but if I'm using the laptop, then I'm using MM.

Originally, I had MM installed locally on the PC and laptop, and the music library stored on an external drive connected to the PC. The database was located originally on the PC, then I moved it to the external drive. The laptop installation pointed at the database on the PC/then external drive.

This worked, but was annoying because if I wanted to play music, I would have to switch the PC on.

So I went with a NAS instead. Now, clearly I have to turn the NAS on to use it, so I haven't reduced the number of things that have to be turned on, but it's definitely a better and easier solution.

And the obvious thing to try was to have MM installed portably on the NAS. That way, I wouldn't need to maintain local MM installations or local databases.

But I encountered too many problems. So I have rolled back to local installations of MM (still have it portably installed on the NAS, as sometimes I might want to work directly like that).

Now, this works much better, and I just have to make sure I keep the PC and laptop databases in sync (I backup to the NAS and use that as the master copy). It's a bit more of an irritation.

Oh, and I also have all my music on a 1TB external hard drive with MM installed on it. and a Cowon X7!

But really, thinking about how this is all working now I've settled down a bit, for most purposes I will probably end up using poweramp or whatever on my tablet to play music (or maybe via mobile phone) from the NAS. I will probably be using MM most for keeping track of everything, for ripping CDs, for syncing to the Cowon X7, and for creating playlists and whatnot.

So to be honest I can live without a single MM installation on a NAS. The overheads associated with keeping two interfaces more or less in line and two databases in sync are not so great really (I can use other software to back up and keep the databases in sync). It's not a deal breaker. If it worked, that would be great, but when I bought MM I didn't even really know what a NAS was, so it's not like I feel I've wasted any money.

(Nearly) exact the same situation here. I use MM4 as jukebox and therefore the database for a fast search for title, album, artist.
[quote]I don't burn music. I don't sync to or transfer to any form of personal audio player. I don't use MM for viewing video. I don't create virtual CD's. I don't use anywhere near all of the library classes and groupings that are available. I don't use nor care about all the other ratings.[/quote]+1
I would love to see some built-in functions to detect and identify added songs (MusicBrainz/AcoustID, something like "Picard") and then tag the tracks from high quality sources (i.e. Musicbrainz) including covers.

And I would like to access the database with external (self-coded) programs. The actual situation with IUNICODE "prevent" any external write access. Of course, this should be possible with a shared, non-exclusive MM4-database.

OK .... from my personal point of view.

I use MM as a Jukebox only. I have a library of ~16000 tracks of music and radio shows (early BBC comedy if your interested). I also use it to listen to a couple of net radio stations. I do like the Tag from Web function. Any files that I add are tagged when added to the library. The library is well ordered on one drive (heavily backed up! :wink: ).

I have three machines that have MM loaded. I want to use just the one database and file source so any changes made on one machine are reflected on all three. I use a NAS unit over a home LAN.

I don't burn music. I don't sync to or transfer to any form of personal audio player. I don't use MM for viewing video. I don't create virtual CD's. I don't use anywhere near all of the library classes and groupings that are available.

I want music listed by artist, album and title. I don't use nor care about all the other ratings. (I do appreciate that there are some serious audiophiles that do).

I want a fast, lean, user friendly Jukebox. MM3 fits the bill perfectly with the exception of the Tag from web. The word simple springs to mind.

I would imagine there are as many different ways of using MM as there are users. :)

Sure, we definitely try to please our users, even though it's sometimes hard as people have different requirements. As for MM4 - it added a lot of new features and also is faster than MM3 - when the DB is installed locally. While the networked DB is still supported, we can't guarantee the same performance as for the local DB. It isn't that we don't care, it's just that we are facing technical limits that don't look like resolvable. And, we believe that instead of shared DB, there are and will be better solutions.

Maybe it would help if the users who think that they require this kind of setup would describe their usage of MM, so that we better understand what needs to be implemented in the future versions, so that this problem is resolved for everyone.

Jiri

Thanks for the comments Jiri.

From this users perspective, MM4 is a real retrograde step from MM3. It may be faster as you say but as MM3 ran smooth as silk without any lags as far as I could notice on my system I fail to see where any improvements actually are. Please note - as a user. Even if MM4 ran as quickly over the network as MM3 did I would have to say that the only reason to actually upgrade was to get back the "tag from web" function that was lost in MM3. I do realise that you will have your own road map for the future of MM but the functionality has been reduced considerably with the network issues introduced with MM4. I remember Musicmatch many years ago .... I thought it was a superb piece of software. It was fast, smooth ... loved it. Then the developers changed its database and it became slow and unwieldy and that's when I found MediaMonkey which did everything that Musicmatch used to do (actually a bit faster also) so I changed. That was a long time ago. The real plus in Mediamonkey was (up to the introduction of MM4) its speed and consequently its user friendliness. I realise that really, with a huge number of users all using different devices you are having to try and create a jack of all trades to try and cater for everyone. I don't envy you that. I would like to gently remind you that pre MM$, MediaMonkey shone for its speed and usability. Please try not to forget that that was what it was very, very good for.

MediaMonkey - love it to bits and really respect all of the developers but please, don't forget the basics.

We are limited by what SQLite and the HW can offer. Since MM4 does more data processing due to added features, it also has more requirements on DB engine performance. For this reason, locally installed DB is strongly preferred, because networked solutions can introduce bottlenecks. Note that MM4 is actually faster than MM3 in almost all aspects.

Such networked solutions would probably only work well if we used some SQL server (i.e. something different from SQLite), but it isn't on our roadmap for several reasons. In the future versions we rather plan to improve cooperation of multiple machines by better synchronization and UPnP improvements.

Jiri

I am very relieved to have found this topic. I thought I was losing my mind.

I too have a D-Link DNS-323 NAS where I store the MM.db file and all my music. My network is Gigabit. I have three WinXP machines of various configurations that access the db, although NEVER at the same time. MM3 worked flawlessly in this setup. MM4 does not. Nothing in my setup, network, or machines had changed when I did the first upgrade from MM3 to MM4, and nothing in my setup, network, or machines have changed since I upgraded to MM4.0.5.1496 the day before yesterday.

Moving the MM.db locally to my crappiest machine resolves the issues and gives me the performance that I used to get when that same db was stored on my NAS.

Moving the db file to the NAS gives me the same issues that everyone else in this thread has experienced: performance renders MM4 unusable.

As the author of this thread has painstakingly illustrated, this is an issue that was introduced in MM4. There is no debate required on this fact.

So, after being a Gold lifetime licensee for the past four years, I too am faced with either having to rollback to MM3 and lose those bug fixes (web update, duplicate playlist track dialog under my taskbar, etc) or move to other SW. This saddens me that so many people are experiencing the same, identical problem yet development is still not taking this issue seriously.

Please take this seriously and help to resolve this issue. I love MM but am frustrated by the lack of resolution.

Just like to add that I too suffer this same problem and have done since I updated the v4 shortly after its release. Never did solve it despite using debug MM etc . I put up with it which saddens me as the problem seems to be just ignored by the MM developers of whom I have the highest regard. Would love to see it solved. I use many programs that access my NAS unit - only MM4 falls over. MM3 was lightning fast.

You are not alone.

That makes little sense anyway you look at it. The only reasonable explanation would seem that the drive where MM was installed locally has speed issues. One would expect that moving all to NAS would be slower as more has to be read/written to the NAS which has a slower network connection (than internal HDD connection) and furthermore has a slow drive. Alternatively your local install has been an upgraded (several times) install and/or has addons the portable network install doesn't that slow things down. Another alternative would be how Windows manages running an application of a local drive vs. a network drive (maybe more caching in memory thus faster speeds).

One thing that may be of use here is to create a test sequence (a sequence of operation in MM) execute them for both a local install and a network install and log both in separate debug logs. The differences between the logs may give the developers clues as to where the problem may lie.

So here's an update on the situation... I've been trying some stuff and various workarounds. Also, I tried defragmenting the DB file using defraggler, that didn't change anything.

I decided to try something a bit unorthodox: I did a portable MM installation directly on my NAS (in a MediaMonkey folder), so the .ini and DB files are now hosted in the same folder, all on the NAS. Music files are of course still on the same NAS.
So instead of running a local instance of MM that's trying to access a networked DB, I run a networked instance of MM accessing something akin to a local DB (in the sense that the DB is in the same local folder).
Surprise (or not!), this works like a charm! I do get some bottleneck issues that are probably related to my relatively low-quality NAS combined with a green drive (5400ish rpm) but these are 'normal' length and predictable, ie: when moving a bunch of .flac files + editing data on a bunch of tracks + playing some other files all at the same time. And they don't result in MM freezing for 5 minutes.

This, to me, completely validates the fact that neither the NAS or the network are to blame for these performance issues, but rather isolates MM as the source of the problem. I know less than nothing about SQL so I couldn't begin to say what might be the cause but now I'm pretty much convinced that something was changed in MM4 that screwed up how it handles network queries, that used to work fine in MM3.

So for anyone else having this issue, a portable MM install on the NAS is a workaround that doesn't involve a ton of user sacrifice, at least for me. I'm kinda looking around for a machine to build my first server on so eventually I'll just switch over to a DLNA setup (with an always-on server) but for now that'll have to do.

at nearly 11K tracks I don't yet see this problem, though i am hosting the DB on a WHS2011 system. 2 fulltime running clients (one on the server for DLNA devices, one on my HTPC for piping music into my backyard via the wireless speakers I have. Laptop connects at random. usually add music from it to the DB and music store location, also on the server. It is possible your NAS's and such may have file access limitations causing you these delays, MM3 may run more things through one connection than MM4 does. Not really sure how it all works in MM itself so this is just a USWAG. Things might work better if they convert it to a fully realized SQL Database and use MS SQL Express to host the DB. Client systems can then talk directly to real SQL server under far more robust and powerful conditions.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/editions/2012-editions/express.aspx
Best is SQL Express is free!

I was glad to find this thread although it's very concerning. I also use MM on a laptop with all music stored on a server (hp mediasmart). It's always been slow, but it sounds like version 4 will likely be worse. I just installed version 4 on my new laptop. My problem is that the 20,000 tracks or so are not importing from the server - only 3,000 and then it says that the rest don't meet the criteria. I don't know what's happening with that. I am very intrigued at the possibility that storing a database locally could possibly help somewhat. If anyone can give directions for how to try that, I'd be grateful.