When editing metadata on my audiobooks, I often find myself needing to write different author and narrator (composer) metadata to each chapter. For example, when the book is a collection or anthology. I want to have the specific author/narrator of a poem or short story rather than a list of authors …

To exclude the external 1 TB SSD you could copy the file(s) on your internal local drive. (Is this a SSD too? Or a HDD?) How does it change the writing time? And what kind of files do you use? FLAC? Mp3? Something else?

The files are chaptered .m4b audiobook files, and thus far moving to my local HDD hasn't made a significant difference. I started the operation when I made the initial post a half-hour ago, and I'm only 1/3 of the way through.

You could make a simple test and time it: Copy the file from your external usb storage to an internal drive and back again. How long does that take? Just a comparison: USB has a conection speed of 20 to 60 MBps, the SATA bus has up to 6GBps.

[image] Nolaine: Admittedly, the file is stored on an external 1TB SSD drive, so maybe it's the USB connection; It can also be the SSD itself. Many somewhat cheap SSDs (and these in turn are often built into external SSDs) write slowly with large amounts of data. This is partly due to the NAN…

[image] Nolaine: If I had to guess, I'd say it seems like the save process is saving the file all over again after changing the metadata for each individual chapter. Like, it edits one chapter's metadata, re-saves the file, edits the next chapter's metadata, re-saves the whole file, etc etc. But…

Thanks, I will test this. It's actually still processing from when I started my test upon making this post, because it wasn't done when my computer went to sleep after I went to bed. I will initiate a new test. However, made multiple successive edits with other files, I didn't notice a significant …

Thank you, this is helpful information even though I can now conclude that the problem I'm having happens regardless of whether I'm writing to an external SSD or an internal drive. I was unaware of this and will remember it for future purchases.

Thanks. Copying the file back and forth takes only a few seconds, and conducting the save operation on my internal HDD takes every bit as long as it did when I was doing it on the external SSD, so that is ruled out as the source of the problem.

[image] Nolaine: Obviously these files are very LONG audio files with many tracks, much longer (and often with many more tracks) than most music albums, which is probably why this issue might not be apparent to people who use it for music files. Are we talking of 1 big file or many smaller fi…

In this case, it's one big file. An .m4b is a chaptered .m4a file, so when you list chapters as separate files, basically what it's doing is showing each chapter individually, but they're all still part of the same, large file. So whatever changes are made to a single chapter or a set of multiple c…

Excessively long save operation when writing chapter metadata in audiobook files

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ohrenkino November 1, 2022, 6:39am 12

Here is a thread that reports a similar behaviour.
But apparently that never got to an end:

It would be nice if such a file could be supplied for testing purposes.
Also, there has been a report about MP3tag loading files and the defender.

Perhaps this contributes to the problem