[itm1960]

I want to use Kodi 17.3 on Android to play random songs from my entire music collection (about 90,000 tracks), which is stored on an SMB share. I've added the share as a music source, and created a party mode playlist which simply excludes the genre of "comedy". When I try to turn on party mode I get this error: "Party mode aborted. No matching songs in the library".
Any ideas??

[DaveBlake]

Can you show what partymode.xsp looks like please (in your userdata folder). I suspect that the rule to ignore comedy is somehow excluding everything.

[Mike_Doc]

Have you scraped the source into your library?

[itm1960]

Have you scraped the source into your library?

Ah no...that would be the problem. It looks like that will be an even bigger problem - the scan has been running for an hour and is still at 0%. It's still scanning the "A" artist folders. It looks like it's not going to be able to handle a collection this large.

[DaveBlake]

Well spotted Mike

@itm1960 I suspect you have "fetch additional info on library update" setting enabled - the slow part is fetching additional artist and album data from online sources (or nfo files), the Musicbrainz site used to identify items requires only 1 request per second. Also the progress bar does sit at 0% in v17 (a kind of bug, well it doesn't spend time counting how many items first before trying to scan them)

In v18 the process will be changed to scan all the tags from music files first, populating the library with basics so you can use it, then go fetch the online art and bios etc. in the background.

For v17 and a large collection I would disble "fetch additional info on library update", than start scan to library. Once complete, assuming you want art and bios etc. go to the albums node and click "query info for all" from the context menu. When that is done do the same for artists.

90k of songs is not the largest library, I know users with more.
But the songs node without filtering will be slow to display, approach via genre, or album or artist, or create custom nodes (or use Party mode). Also, initially at least, stay with the default skin or Confluence, avoiding those that do extra things in the background.

[itm1960]

I already had "fetch additional information during updates" disabled, but had "Default provider for album/artist information" set to Universal Artist Scraper. I changed that to "Local information only". Still the scan is taking forever - stuck on 0% for the first 10 minutes

[DaveBlake]

I already had "fetch additional information during updates" disabled, but had "Default provider for album/artist information" set to Universal Artist Scraper. I changed that to "Local information only". Still the scan is taking forever - stuck on 0% for the first 10 minutes

If "fetch additional information" is disabled then the defaut scraper setting is not going to make any difference to the scanning of music into the library.

As I explained the progress bar will say 0% throughout the scan.

The speed of scanning the tags from music files will depend on processor power and disc access and network speed, but with any thing 90k of music files is going to take a while. With Android and SMB probably hours.

Persoanlly I would split that much music into separate music sources for convenience.

[itm1960]

Yes it's been going 2 hours now and is still on the "B" artists. I think I might have to give up and see if I can find a dedicated Android music app that handles large collections on network drives.

[docwra]

Maybe stick with it, the music scanning is slow but brings many benefits.

Its just a shame Kodi has to rescan the entire collection each time you add 1 album!!

[DaveBlake]

Its just a shame Kodi has to rescan the entire collection each time you add 1 album!!

Now Zag you should know that isn't true. :p

Library update runs through the music source(s) looking for changed or new folders or files, otherwise how is it meant to know what you added? You will see it checking through all your music, looking at timestamp and size. But it only actually scans the tags from those that are new or changed.

Yes finding the new/changed things takes a little time if you have a large collection, but no where near the time it takes to scan the tags from every file the first time the surce is added.

Partial Library Scan: Adding An Album to a Large Library
Also rather than do a library update, to add some new music you can trigger a scan of just part of a music source. Navigate in file view to where the new album is located and from the context menu choose "scan to library", that will just process that album, or folder of albums etc.

This means having "Update library on startup" disabled too.

But if you can't remember what you added or changed, then a full library update will find it for you.

[Mike_Doc]

it takes a while to scrape, I've around 75,000 tracks so far and it does scrape it in. If you can just leave it running overnight then do that just start and forget. Can't remember how long Krypton took as I haven't done a full rebuild for a while, but Leia take somewhere between 5-8 hours, bit vague but never both fully timed it while testing music in Leia.

[docwra]

Partial Library Scan: Adding An Album to a Large Library
Also rather than do a library update, to add some new music you can trigger a scan of just part of a music source. Navigate in file view to where the new album is located and from the context menu choose "scan to library", that will just process that album, or folder of albums etc.

Actually did not know that, it might help a lot!

Currently simply adding a album to my collection takes over 30mins on a full audio library update.