Best File Manager For Really Large Folders

mooreted · 2009-01-11 05:29:37

I have a folder with 397GB of music. None of the music players like it much. Rhythmbox and Banshee either wont run or are so slow they're not useable.

I have been using Xmms to play, which is great. Nautilus is way to slow and MC doesn't quite have the features I want.

What file manager would you recommend for really big folders?

MarCustomized · 2009-01-11 05:36:12

It seems to me you need a music player and a file manager. Are you really keeping that much music in a single unorganized folder?
MPD is great with massive music collections. Use it with Sonata or whatever frontend that floats your boat. Rox is a very fast GUI file manager, but it's kinda ugly.

Wintervenom · 2009-01-11 06:34:34

MarCustomized wrote:

Are you really keeping that much music in a single unorganized folder?

If you are, then you might really want to look into Musicbrainz Picard.

mooreted · 2009-01-11 06:38:15

Well, no, not unorganized, but the music folder has one heck of a lot of sub-folders and more sub-folders. The regular music players seem to just choke on it. MC reads it really fast, but I can only select one file at a time to play. It would be nice to make playlists and/or play groups of files.

I will check out Sonata. I have heard of it, but never tried it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate it.

skottish · 2009-01-11 06:43:39

mooreted wrote:

Well, no, not unorganized, but the music folder has one heck of a lot of sub-folders and more sub-folders. The regular music players seem to just choke on it. MC reads it really fast, but I can only select one file at a time to play. It would be nice to make playlists and/or play groups of files.
I will check out Sonata. I have heard of it, but never tried it.
Thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate it.

If you get MPD working out for you, Ario is a very nice client that has a default three pane view (Artist/Album/Song) that's just awesome for making play lists.

mooreted · 2009-01-11 07:03:04

Thanks, I'll try that one too.

MPD is zipping through the music drive like a hot knife through butter. Awesome.

Thanks guys

mooreted · 2009-01-11 07:04:35

Uh oh, problem. While scanning the music drive I got the error:

mpd: layer3.c:2633: mad_layer_III: Assertion `stream->md_len + md_len - si.main_data_begin <= (511 + 2048 + 8)' failed.

Too big for MPD?

.:B:. · 2009-01-11 07:11:19

Seems like a libmad bug when you google it .

mooreted · 2009-01-11 07:15:19

Huh, all I found were pages in German, lol.

Okay, on the hunt for bugs.

Why can't things just work?

Thanks.

MarCustomized · 2009-01-11 07:18:24

You may also want to look into using ReiserFS, as it handles vast file system structures with small files amazingly.

Last edited by MarCustomized (2009-01-11 07:19:35)

mooreted · 2009-01-11 07:21:43

This is on my Windows drive, so I'm stuck with NTFS.

Thanks.

Zariel · 2009-01-11 11:39:32

You might want to look into this, http://www.alittletooquiet.net/software/pytagsfs/

It creates a virtual filesystem from tags which you can interact with causing it to edit tags of the files. Though you should probally migrate the system to ext4 or reiserFS, but I guess you use the music in windows too?

seenxu · 2009-01-11 15:12:28

I have much more music put into one single folder on a ntfs filesystem drive.
never had any problem to manage them with thunar and playing those with cmus.

mooreted · 2009-01-11 15:30:20

Zariel wrote:

You might want to look into this, http://www.alittletooquiet.net/software/pytagsfs/
It creates a virtual filesystem from tags which you can interact with causing it to edit tags of the files. Though you should probally migrate the system to ext4 or reiserFS, but I guess you use the music in windows too?

Well, Windows is on a 500GB drive and Linux is on a 40GB 10,000 RPM Raptor. I use Windows for commercial games like BioShock. It was the only drive the music would fit on.

mooreted · 2009-01-11 15:31:31

seenxu wrote:

I have much more music put into one single folder on a ntfs filesystem drive.
never had any problem to manage them with thunar and playing those with cmus.

Huh, cmus looks interesting. Thanks.

Zeist · 2009-01-11 15:36:44

397GB isn't that much music. I have about 2TB and MPD runs fine on it, MOC works as well... and so did foobar2000 on windows.

MarCustomized · 2009-01-11 15:46:50

Zeist wrote:

397GB isn't that much music. I have about 2TB and MPD runs fine on it, MOC works as well... and so did foobar2000 on windows.

FLAC?! That's a ****load of .mp3's.

mooreted · 2009-01-11 15:50:29

Zeist wrote:

397GB isn't that much music. I have about 2TB and MPD runs fine on it, MOC works as well... and so did foobar2000 on windows.

If MPD would work, that would be great. I posted in the MPD forum, maybe someone has seen that error before. The songs MPD is griping about play just fine in XMMS, so I don't know what it's problem is.

2TB? Holy cow!

mooreted · 2009-01-11 15:54:21

I didn't try Thunar at first because it's so much like Nautilus I thought it would be just as slow, but it's actually pretty darn quick. Nice.

sa · 2009-01-11 19:24:38

I've used about everything there is. Amarok was nice for a while, but there were a ton of little annoyances that added up and eventually I was too frustrated to keep using it. I have settled on XMMS2 + gxmms2 + xmms2-scrobbler. It's been good to me.

Ideally, foobar2000 would be ported to Linux. There is nothing like it.

I also prefer PCManFM as a file manager. Dolphin and Thunar are OK. but PCManFM is very fast...it's good at dealing with my giant directories with thousands of files in it.

Also, for all that music, what file system do you have it on? I used to keep all my music on an NTFS drive for compatibility but it kept screwing itself up and it was slow, but recently I switched to ReiserFS and I've seen amazing improvements.

Last edited by sa (2009-01-11 19:26:58)

mooreted · 2009-01-11 20:59:57

Boy, lots of good suggestions, thanks everyone.

Yeah, the normal music managers all suck as much as iTunes does. Nice if you have a few songs and you just want to load an Mp3 player, but when you start getting a lot of content they're terrible.

Okay, tying the next suggestion. Thanks again.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-11 05:29:37

Best File Manager For Really Large Folders

#2 2009-01-11 05:36:12

Re: Best File Manager For Really Large Folders

#3 2009-01-11 06:34:34

Re: Best File Manager For Really Large Folders

#4 2009-01-11 06:38:15

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#5 2009-01-11 06:43:39

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#6 2009-01-11 07:03:04

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