Is anyone having problems with the song picker in BIAB 2014?
Having upgraded, I recently tried rebuilding the song list and it takes ages. It always took quite a while, but in 2014 it is much slower. Is this expected and can anything be done to speed it up?
And while on the subject..... Why can't BIAB update the list automatically when I save a new song? At least I would then only have to rebuild the list if I copied or deleted a song outside of BIAB.
The first time you run it, including after an update, it does take awhile. Subsequent running is pretty fast for me, though. Are you saying it is always slow?
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It is always slow for me. It doesn't seem to do anything different between the first and subsequent runs. It always loads every song in the folder to find out the information necessary. This used to zip through with each song flashing past in a fraction of a second. Now it seems to pause on each song for a second or two making the whole thing very slow.
Yes, I am running AVG. I'm running Windows 7 and BIAB is installed on a second drive in D:\BB
None of this has changed since it was quick running before the upgrade and slow running after. All I've done is upgraded BIAB to 2014 in the same place it was before.
Turning off AVG makes no difference. It takes about 2 seconds per song. It took it about 30 seconds to get to 16 out of 476. So it's going to take a while to finish
- you are running as Administrator (so you have access and R/W permissions), and - you did NOT install BIAB into the "C:\Programs Files (x86)" or "C:\Program Files" folders?
Good luck
Last edited by Larry Kehl; 01/13/1405:07 PM.
Win10Pro,i9,64GB,2TBSSD+20TBHDDs,1080TI,BIAB'24,Scarlett18i8,Montage7,Fusion 8HD,QS8,Integra7,XV5080,QSR,SC-8850,SPLAT,FL21&others,Komp.14,IK suite&others, just a guitar player-AXE FX III &FM9T, FishmanTP, MIDIGuitar2, GK2/3'sw/GI20
Have you tried installing to the C drive? If that speeds things up, check your D drive; might be going bad.
My thinking at this point in the dilemma as well.
But it might not be anything more than 1)Not enough Free Space left on that drive, as in less than around 10-15%, and/or 2) the Drive could be in need of Defragmenting.
Investigating both issues is worth a shot at this point IMO.
I have the same problem on my machine. It took about 1 second per file to build the song list. I could see it load each file in turn (I guess it had to load the file to see the file info), and so just do the math when trying to create a songlist of thousands of songs.
It would seem to me that the process should just be able to read the information from byte offsets in the file (since PGMusic knows the file structure), and shouldn't require loading each song to just find out standard information about each file. But that does not seem to be the way it does it.
I rebuilt the song list of all the MGU files I have downloaded from the internet over time, so that's about 30,000 files (after eliminating all the exact duplicates). It took all night to rebuild the list.
My machine is an i5 with 7200 RPM drives that normally works pretty quickly on everything else. Everything is installed to the hard drive.
I haven't tried rebuilding it, though, because I don't want to tie up my machine for that long.
John
Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 12TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 12TB SATA
Not that it helps Andy but the drive installation/location should not be the issue since, mine is installed similarly "D:\music\bb" and song picker for my BB directory (~30K list including all sub-Dirs that contian stuff back to BIAB DOS V2 and most, not all, duplicates removed) comes up in a ~second (although if I have to re-build lsit it takes hours).
However, as Mac and others have mentioned/alluded that doesn’t eliminate a physically failing D drive or one in need of cleanup or other MX actions
Last edited by Larry Kehl; 01/13/1409:01 PM.
Win10Pro,i9,64GB,2TBSSD+20TBHDDs,1080TI,BIAB'24,Scarlett18i8,Montage7,Fusion 8HD,QS8,Integra7,XV5080,QSR,SC-8850,SPLAT,FL21&others,Komp.14,IK suite&others, just a guitar player-AXE FX III &FM9T, FishmanTP, MIDIGuitar2, GK2/3'sw/GI20
are you always starting up Song Picker in the same DIRECTORY (probably, but not necessarily, D:\BB?). Also Is there a " SongListTemp4.BIN" in your D:\BB directory, that is the actual file built and written to when Song Picker creates a new list for that particular directory - also that file should have a date/time stamp of last time you BUILT it . Symptoms sound like BIAB can’t FIND the .bin file so it thinks it needs rebuilt for that directory .
Win10Pro,i9,64GB,2TBSSD+20TBHDDs,1080TI,BIAB'24,Scarlett18i8,Montage7,Fusion 8HD,QS8,Integra7,XV5080,QSR,SC-8850,SPLAT,FL21&others,Komp.14,IK suite&others, just a guitar player-AXE FX III &FM9T, FishmanTP, MIDIGuitar2, GK2/3'sw/GI20
... It would seem to me that the process should just be able to read the information from byte offsets in the file (since PGMusic knows the file structure), and shouldn't require loading each song to just find out standard information about each file. But that does not seem to be the way it does it.
...
John, that's an excellent suggestion. I must admit I was surprised the first time I used this tool and saw how the complete song file was loaded so as to be analyzed.
Yes, surely the file could be opened and the appropriate record structure(s) searched to extrapolate the relevant data. I imagine that time-wise at least one or two orders of magnitude could be saved.
Regards Trevor
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
I don't know if this is useful information but it just took my Songpicker 18 minutes to build a list of just under 1,800 songs. So that's approximately 100 songs a minute.
As the list was being built, I noticed that the yellow message kept popping up to tell me that there were better Realtracks available for many of the songs that were loaded.
It occurred to me that going into Realtrack Preferences and disabling all the things I've listed below might help build the list quicker because less has to be done on loading the song. I'm not sure if disabling #6 on the image will deactivate everything else (I haven't yet tried it).
Sampletank takes quite a while to load and I suspect that song files that have Sampletank loaded as a VST/DXi could slow things down a bit (#4 on the image) if it loads with the song.
The above is only a theory but it might be worth investigating.
Just to clarify. This is only rebuilding the list that takes time. Using the song picker is fine.
The issue I have is that if I want to use the song picker then every time I create a new song I have to rebuild the list. This used to take a minute or two. Now it takes 10s of minutes making the song picker much less useful.
It sounds like others are suffering similar problems. John seems to have given up too, not wanting to tie up his machine for hours.
Noel's suggestion of turning stuff off sounds like it might help, but I really shouldn't have to be doing this. BIAB should do it automatically when it is "rebuild list" mode.
Actually John's suggestion is much better BIAB should only be reading the information it needs. I suspect they have just used the "load a song" rather than writing something specific and with all the new features this has become a lot slower. I've never liked the way it throws away what you are doing while it loads all the songs.
As I said at the start of this. I don't understand why BIAB can't automatically add the one new song I have just created as it is saved. Then I only have to rebuild the list if I make changes outside BIAB.
Maybe PG Music should try and get hold of Stefano Lazzaretto and ask if they can incorporate BBFinder in BIAB. It seems to be able to search thousands of file including zip file in no time.
Currently I consider the song picker to be unusable.
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