Slow Searching

Why is searching and sorting slow (in the 32bit version)?

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, in the 64bit version, i've removed my old, creaky, written-from-the-seat-of-my-pants database, and replaced it with one based on SQLite. In the 64bit version, all the data is in one place, and all those progress bars have just "gone away". Keep in mind however that this was is a MAJOR re-write of a huge portion of my code, so there ARE new bugs because of this.

How to Speed Up Searches (in the 32bit version)

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.