Switching Between Cart Sets

English Feature Requests
1

Hi, just a quick message to see if anyone else is having the same problem me.
When I switch between my cart sets using the buttons on the cartwall it takes about 5-7 seconds to load which is very annoying!! Is this happening to anyone else is there a way to speed it up?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

2

I just tested this on what Torben calls my ‘very old’ PC next door (AMD Duron 1GHz processor with 1GB of RAM).

I run a 25-slot Cartwall and, because this is a truly ‘stand-alone’ PC (no Internet, no WiFi, no LAN), all audio files are stored on the local HD. I am running the latest build of V3.0 (build 680).

The only other difference (and this should NOT be significant) is that I use the Cartwall dropdown, rather than buttons, to change Cart Sets.

So, on my PC, loading a full 25-slot Cart Set takes about three seconds, which I find entirely acceptable for my needs.

Factors which could increase that loading time in your case include:

[ul][li]The number of (occupied!) Cart Players in the Cart Set you are loading.[/li]
[li]The location of the audio files (if they are physically on another PC on your LAN, that will usually be slightly slower to load).[/li]
[li]Speed of processor and/or amount of RAM (unlikely to be less than mine, right? ;)).[/li][/ul]

So, you should be able to reduce your Cartwall load time by any/all of:

[ul][li]Reducing the number of slots (Players) in your Cartwall.[/li]
[li]Populating fewer Cart Players in the Cart Set you are loading (i.e. don’t have EVERY slot filled).[/li]
[li]Moving the audio files to the local PC hard disk (if they are physically elsewhere at present).[/li][/ul]

Bear in mind that loading a Cart Player is the exact same process as loading a ‘main playlist’ Player, though AFAIK mAirList runs a Cart Set load multi-threaded (i.e. can load several Cart Players simultaneously); so if (e.g.) loading a main Player takes 1s, loading 25 Cartwall Players will take significantly less than 25s. (Now I come to think of it, taking only 3 seconds to load 25 on my PC is pretty darned good IMHO!)

Hope that helps.

Also, I’m just curious: you say that a loading time of 5–7 seconds is ‘very annoying’ for you; could you elaborate on why that is? I don’t think I would find that delay such a hardship personally, even if I were live on air.

BFN
CAD

3

I have noticed the Cartwall load-time to be a little slow on recent versions, certainly in the recent 3.1 builds at least. I use the “tab” view but I also observe a slow load when using the simple “Load Set” button. I run a 6x7 array and get a load rate of about 2 Cartwall boxes per second. This is a 2.66GHz Celeron WinXP SP3 machine with 2GB RAM.

It would appear that the visual data is loaded (from the .mlc file) and the audio is processed after, which could be the delay. I don’t know how Torben deals with the audio - whether he loads every button into an array or whether it’s done at “click time”.

4

As I said earlier, Charlie, every Cartwall Player gets loaded just the same as a Playlist Player.

Hence there is the same routine: check in database (if any); if not, check for an MMD; if not, perform the standard Auto Cue processing, then (if it’s a ‘tag format’ file like MP3), check for an internal tag for things like Artist and Title. Somewhere in there, any ~ file name processing would happen as well.

And this is for EVERY Cartwall Player loaded, so in Charlie’s case, this would happen a total of 42 times. Multi-threaded, yes: but still 42 Players to load if the MLC is ‘full.’

Hence, it’s a VERY good idea to import any carts into your database, if you’re using one (To jw: Sorry, I forgot that suggestion originally!). That will make the loading the fastest it can be (cue points, artist, title, etc. will get loaded direct from the database, and no Auto Cue), subject to all the other things I mentioned originally. ;D

BFN
CAD

5

Hi guys thanks so much for quick replies I appreciate it.
I’ll the suggestions a go tomorrow :slight_smile:
And @Cad i’m a just pretty impatient person I guess. I never really understood the cart loading process though, thanks for your information!

Joe

6

Joe, you’re very welcome! We’re all here to help, and (until the Manual is written) to assist our fellow mAirList users. After all, we were all newbies at one time!

And yeah, we’re all impatient, I suppose: it’s all relative. ;D

BFN
CAD