Netgear Readynas Ultra 2 plus

[DavidHB]

Hi, Claus

Given that MP3Tag has, on its Tools menu, a simple but very effective auto numbering wizard, getting MP3Tag to work better for you would appear to be a priority.

I can think of only three factors that would cause the slowdown, and they could be combined.

Firstly, you may be using MP3Tag over the network. If you are directly accessing the music files on your NAS, and you are trying to open a lot of files at once, this could be part of the problem. More importantly, perhaps, it begs the question as to how you are doing backups. My strategy is to download, rip or edit all music files in the master library on my PC (a backup drive attached to the PC will probably do as well), and then copy all changes (using the Microsoft SyncToy application) to my NAS boxes, and have MinimServer do a rescan. That way I automatically have backups in place.

Secondly, your PC may be a bit old or have limited resources. Again loading a lot of files at once (particularly if the PC is short of RAM) can choke the available memory, leading to a lot of disk swapping.

Thirdly, with a medium sized music collection you can slow down even a high spec computer if you try to access too many files at once in MP3Tag. The art is to access only a few folders at a time. Try loading, say, just a dozen folders (or up to 200 tracks) at one go, and see if you still get the slowdown. If things are set up so that Mp3Tag will try to load everything at once, select a music folder in Windows Explorer, and use its right click context menu to open it in Mp3Tag, then use the 'Add folder' button to include more folders to the selection.

If you can work reasonably quickly in MP3Tag with one or two folders loaded at a time, the auto numbering wizard is your best bet. All this assumes that (as is customary and sensible) you have each album in its own sub-folder. If, for any reason, you have albums all jumbled up together, I recommend that you correct this, and rearrange your folder structure accordingly, before you do anything else.

David