Hi all,

I've got a music driven game and I want to stream music from the PC. Playing tracks from the PC is fine, but reading Album names from the MediaLibrary is amazingly slow! It can take up to 5 seconds just to get the name of 1 album, artist or song.

The guide doesn't seem to have this problem though.

Am I missing something here? Is there another way to get music info from a PC?

Or is this just the way it is?

Cheers,
Steve

In Playtest: Beat Hazard

ShadowRage,
I posted a similar message ( http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/32359.aspx ) four months ago and received zero replies.  I have spent many (over 100) hours testing and agonizing over how to speed up and/or work around the ridiculously lethargic and poorly implemented MediaLibrary classes.  It's bad enough that the classes are so slow but worst of all they lock up the display thread when you access them (see my post for code example of this).  You're right about the built in guide music app doesn't have this poor performance, they obviously aren't using the XNA MediaLibrary classes to access the information.  So as far as I can tell you aren't missing anything here, the XNA MediaLibrary objects simply suck.  If you discover something different please let me know.

I don't have nearly as bad of performance on my PC, even my 30GB Zune performs much better than the XBOX with a similar size library.  Also they intentionally cripple the functionality for the PC and XBOX as only the Zune supports the album art fields.

Regards,
Dave

ps  I'm hoping someone points out some ridiculous error I've made that responsible for this poor performance but I'm not holding my breath.

Firstly its not intentionally crippled. In the time they had available they implemented what they could. They had 3 different underlying media APIs to wrap in a single consistent way and from what I've been told some of those libraries simply dont support everything needed.

As for your problem, I wish I had an answer beyond put the request into connect and cross your fingers for the next release whenever that may be.

Zman, thanks for that.

Dave,

My work around is to get the data a bit at a time and save it. e.g. to start with my the album list just says : Album1, Album2 etc.... when the player selects an album it goes away and gets the data.

By spreading the work out like this is becomes a serise of manageable 2-4 seconds delays.
It's not too bad done like that.
Dunno if that will help you though.

Cheers,
Steve

In Review: Beat Hazard

I am battling with this issue as well, and have not yet found a solution.

The most maddening thing is the fact that the latency in accessing media data locks up rendering even if when you try to work around the issue by doing your work in a separate thread.

As it stands now, it is pretty much impossible to create a usable media interface.