Heads-up to folks who download nightlies or build from trunk! I just landed bug 8247 which included a change to our library database schema. It turns out using 36 character strings instead of integers as foreign keys bloats the size of your database and generally slows things down. This fix reduces our library database size by almost 50% and gives us an all-around performance boost, particularly on large libraries.
The down side is that your current Songbird library will not be compatible with future versions of Songbird, starting with tonight’s nightly. The fix is easy — simply delete your profile and re-import your library. There is another option for those who would prefer to keep their libraries, but it takes some skills. It involves using the sqlite command line tool and running a migration script on each of your Songbird library database files. If you’re gung-ho to give this a try, Peter documented the steps on our wiki.
10 Comments
SubscribeWill there be a migration during the 0.6 release?
@Benjamin Frisch
At the moment, for this one release, we’re not planning on supporting migration from previous versions to 0.6. Apologies in advance, and fret not, this will not be the new regular!
Thanks for the update on the database schema changes. End users with large libraries (including me) will be appreciative of this….
Wow the database was much faster parsing and searching on a Huge library, thanks.
Good to know the memory improvements are already underway, but i think i will wait for a blessed build before i migrate. I am assuming that i can’t make this change and keep on 0.5?
@Tim Thanks! There is still more to come in speed improvements
@cellarmation Sorry, you can’t use the new database schema with 0.5 — but the nightlies are not so bad
Just tried out latest nightly on Ubuntu - failed on attempting to build library. I’ll try again in a few days time and report bug if it’s still crashing
I then tried same nightly on XP, and build was noticeably quicker although it munched up 900MB (!) of the 2GB I have. I restarted and it used ~240MB. J.River by comparison uses 130MB. I played one track and it crashed. Again, I’ll report if it persists.
Library navigation on my ~23000 tracks has improved enough to make it usable. Nice work, guys.
Look forward to further P&O work.
Just saying…I saw some of Steve’s latest library improvements today, suffice to say we are all in for a big treat soon.
Great work Steve!
Working with a large library of 48,000+ on songbird 0.5 proved to be unbearable. latest .6 blessed makes it nice and smooth!
i just want to know whos sharing my computer
and what are they putting on it
send message back