Excessive memory usage

Support
1

When dealing with large number of mp3 files (3000) the memory usage becomes excessive.

e.g.

Simply reading the 3000 files in uses 300 Mb

Select all files and then keep evey tag except the comment, which is blanked peaks at 1.5Gb and then one it has finished stays at 1Gb!

Because of this memory usage it takes approx 30 mins to complete the operation.

Machine:
Athlon XP 2400+
1Gb Ram
Win XP SP2
Mp3Tag 2.34a (also same results with 2.33a)

Is this somethig new as after looking through the forum I noticed that other people have processed 5000+ files happily using older versions?

Thanks,

Graeme

2

I cannot reproduce what you said. I just tested MP3Tag with 1152 audio files (mostly MP3 - some WavPack) and the memory usage was below 15 MB. Adding a comment and then removing it resulted in a memory usage of 25 MB.

Edit: I have a Windows XP Home, running on an Intel Pentium 4 HT with 3.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM.

3

Extra machine details:

Fresh install of windows 7 days ago.

ASUS A7n8X motherboard with latest Nvidia Nforce 2 Drivers
WinXP Pro SP2 - With all security fixes
Audigy 2 Soundcard - Latest Drivers
ATI Radeon 9500Pro - Latest Drivers

Very little else is installed at the moment, just some CD/DVD Writing software as I am archiving off data.

I was surprised with this behaviour as I have used MP3Tag for a while, the last version that i was using was about 18 months old as it was working fine and there was no reason to upgrade until now when i reinstalled windows.

The way that i got the listing of the files was to right click on the top level music folder in windows explorer and then select Mp3Tag from the context menu. I have my music arranged in subfolders for each album.

e.g.

Music
|- Album 1
|- Album 2
|- Album 3 - Disc 1
|- Album 3 - Disc 2
etc.

i.e. I do not go more than 1 level deep

Am I the only one that has this problem?

-Graeme

4

I can't reproduce this neither.

Can you please add a new column "Tag size" to Mp3tag's file view (View > Columns...) and use %_tag_size% as value?

Please sort your collection by this field (single click on column header) and post a screenshot of the biggest values.

Best regards,
~ Florian

5

Thanks for the pointer to that tag column.

It appears that a lot of the files have got embedded artwork that I haddn't spotted before. I usually keep the artwork in the folder, but this is in the tags.

Thus there are a lot of files that have tags that are > 0.5 Mb in size!

This would account for the memory usage.

What is the best way for dealing with this embedded artwork? I would probably want to save a copy into the folder as an image and then strip it from the tags to save duplicating the same image 13+ times!

Judging by the memory usage this would save me around 300 Mb from by collection!

Is there a good reason to store the artwork in this inefficient way?

Thanks,

Graeme

p.s. please feel free to move this to the support forum, as this is clearly user error and not a bug in Mp3Tag :wink: