Slow Searching
Why is searching and sorting slow?
Well, frankly it's cuz I am not using a super smart database in the back end. You see, when I started this project, i just whipped something together as fast as I could, so I could see results quickly. In hindsight, it would have been worth my time to invest in understanding how to program SQLite, rather than rolling my own. SQL has these blazing fast indexes that make sorting and searching fast enough to update *as you type*, even for a library with 100,000 songs in it. My implementation, however, is only fast enough if you have say 10,000 songs. But even this bogs down when the meta data is not cached, for example the "Label" field is stored only in xml files next to the song files, that data is not stored in the database proper, so when you go to sort by that, kJams must load every single xml file for every song.
So, eventually i'll be removing my old, creaky, written-from-the-seat-of-my-pants database, and replacing it with one based on SQLite. Once that's done, all the data will be in one place, and all those progress bars will just "go away". Keep in mind however that this is a MAJOR re-write of a huge portion of my code, so when i do this it likely will introduce new bugs.
How to Speed Up Searches
A thing you can do in the mean time to speed up your searches is to hide any columns you don't want to search. The more columns you have showing, the slower the search will go. To show or hide the search columns, just Context Click in the column header and pick the one you want to show or hide.
Another thing you can do is target your searches to one sort column. eg: to search for "Beatles" only in the "Artist" column, type this: "artist:beatles", that will go much faster as it will not waste time looking in other sort columns.
Another, very effective thing you can do is pare down your library. Do you really need six versions of "Love Shack"? No, you probably don't. Pick the best one, trash the rest.
Another thing to do is turn off the Music Stores. They take up a lot of RAM.
Especially slow
Hiding all of these Sort Columns will dramatically speed up searching:
Sub Genre Composer Original Publisher Publisher Rendition Keywords Bio Original Year Language Key BPM
Click here for more info on Searching.
