One of the problems with my HTPC that I have only just started looking at is how to use it to play and manage my large collection of audio CD’s which I have painstakingly ripped to FLAC’s. The Xiph codecs (see previous articles [intlink id=“38” type=“post”]here[/intlink] and [intlink id=“14” type=“post”]here[/intlink]) make it possible to play FLACs in 64bit media center, but the media library was incredibly slow.
Digging around I discovered that the database is stored in C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player and in Windows 7 is now called CurrentDatabase_372.wmdb
User “RM” has posted a very helpful guide on the GreenButton forums about how to move an equivalent database on previous versions of windows but it took me a while to get this working. My problem turned out to be the RAM-Disk I had chosen to use.
I eventually switched to the free version of DataRam RamDisk which works well on Windows 7 x64 and supports drives up to 4Gig. My thanks to user OpenBook on [H]ardForum for the recommendation.
Having set up a RAMdisk successfully I was able to move the library by simply using a registry tweak recommended by user surge, again on the GreenButton Forums.
ਇਸ ਲਈ, the procedure I used is as follows…
- Close any running instances of Media Center and Media Player
- Download, install and set up DataRam RamDisk. Make sure it is set to save on shutdown and reload on startup.
- Right click on ‘computer’ and select manage.
- Expand services and applications, then services.
- Scroll down to “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service”, right click, and stop it.
- Fire up regedit and browse to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences. - Create a new String (REG_SZ) called
LibraryDatabasePath. - Set the value of the new String to the path to your RAMdrive (in my case N:).
- Close regedit.
- If you already have a library and don’t wish to rebuild then copy the contents of
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Playerto your RAMdrive. - Restart the “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” and close the computer management window.
- Restart Media Player or Media Center.
- Voila!
Thank you for this post. Moving the WMP12 DB to a RAMdisk definitely helps WMP12 performance with UPnP devices both at home on the WLAN, or on the road on the Vz 4G-LTE mobile network. I have a large library (570GB on 3Gb SATA), but the DB is still around 300 MB, which easily fits on the RAMdisk. Now the first UPnP read operation is down to a reliable 40 seconds, with subsequent search queries returning full results in under 7 seconds.
I’m using BubbleUPnP as controller/renderer on Moto Droid RAZR. As a benchmark, I can stream video reliably for files with data rate up to 2500kbps, with clear tower signal, over the 4G-LTE network.