I put 800 gig of music on a brand new 1Tb WD hard drive, and connected it to my brand new WD TV Live box, which was working fine…for 1.5 days now the light on the Live box has been flashing - presumably it is in the process of acquainting itself with the contents of the hard drive…but this seems to be taking an awfully long time. Is this normal?..
Well, 800 gig of music is a *LOT* of music, so I don’t know how long to expect it to take to compile it. 
The music is in folders by artist…does this slow down the speed at which it is compiled?
Maybe a fraction of an amount…
CollingsBob wrote:
I put 800 gig of music on a brand new 1Tb WD hard drive, and connected it to my brand new WD TV Live box, which was working fine…for 1.5 days now the light on the Live box has been flashing - presumably it is in the process of acquainting itself with the contents of the hard drive…but this seems to be taking an awfully long time. Is this normal?..
Bob, I told you last week that 800GB was a LOT of music, and Tony said so again. I sent you a link that I hope you read about putting a lot of media (music, in this case) on the HD for the WD player to access. I told you (and/or another guy) that it takes over an hour for my Win 7 PC to rescan and catalog the 80GB music for the WD’s Media server functioning, so lord knows how long it would take for the amount you have. I estimate it would take your PC at least 10 hours to do this, and then for the WD to also catalog it – if it even can. Who knows, you may have exceeded the PC’s and the media player’s capacitiy to handle all this data. So, check back in a week and let us know how it’s all going!
I am curious: how does anyone collect, process and store 800GB of digital music? And, could anyone even live long enough to listen to it all, even once?
Depends on the amount of compression used (maybe it’s all FLAC?) but I always thought that question was kinda moronic, back then why I my 1000+ CD collection wasn’t stashed away in the basement. There’s so many occasions you can listen to music so yes, you’ll live long enough.
Thanks Techflaws for setting me straight! I have a lot of music on CDs and LPs, and now digital downloads as well, (thousands) and I have listened to it all – at least once over the years (Oh, I see I have some CDs still in their shrink wrap for quite a few years, it seems). Anyway, I was just kidding around with the OP, that’s all.
Of course, having all this music, and digitizing it all are two different things. What a time sponge that would be! I remember when the iPod first arrived, and people were hiring others to go through their CD collection to feed them into iTunes! Wonder if that “industry” still exists? 
mike27oct wrote:> I am curious: how does anyone collect, process and store 800GB of digital music? And, could anyone even live long enough to listen to it all, even once?
Yeah Mike, I am sure lots of us do. I have been collecting and trading live music for many years now. For certain bands, I will get a copy of every show on an entire tour. I am currently close to 3TB in FLAC, a minute percentage of it being studio releases. The way I deal with it is not to have the media library on. Each show is in a folder with the “band name - date - venue” as the name, and I just view all my music in folder view. By design though, I have it all in the same share on a file server with the subdirectories underneath, so easy enough to find what I want, and I don’t have to merge multiple sources. Of course embedding the metadata in every song took a long time when I started the transition to FLAC since it has to be done manually and could not be scraped from a DB. It took me all of one Seatttle Winter doing some of it every day to complete. Painful to say the least.
Have I listened to every show? Yes but the majority only once. The best shows / best recordings get replayed. It’s a collector thing, just another hobby I guess, but one that I was into long before we had media players. Yes, 3TB is certainly a good amount of space to have used for music, and then I have it mirrored on top of that, but disks are pretty cheap these days, so the least of my worries. So CollingsBob, 800GB of music sounds pretty reasonable to me…
Techflaws is correct, FLAC takes up a lot more space than lossy formats so that could be the reason for the volume the OP has. I am pretty picky about retaining the best sound quality possible for posterity’s sake, and the circles I trade in won’t accept lossy formats anywhere within the files lineage, so FLAC it is for me.
I’d say take a hard look at why you want to use the media library and weigh the pros and cons. I find that I lose nothing I care about by having it off. That would be my suggestion.
* - No I do not collect Grateful Dead / Phish / Dave Matthews etc which is what people seem to assume when you say you collect live music
** - I collect and trade concerts from bands that allow audience and soundboard recordings (which a large number now as the technology has made it too hard to prevent), as well as rare TV/ Radio performances from around the world. I do not advocate or condone copyright infringement or the illegal downloading of an artists work in any way in this post, or any other post where I may comment on the topic.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming since my pseudo thread hijacking has been completed :dizzy_face:
-P
Jeez, Pearl, hijack a thread is correct – I am sorry I said anything – even as a joke! :smileyvery-happy:
(Actually, there was valuable info in your thread about FLAC, and storage, and media library, and all that sort of thing.)
The files on the hard drive are in a mixture of Flac and MP3 formats…When I had the Hub I let it "compile " for 72 hrs…then, thinking that perhaps the sheer volume of music overwhelmed the Hub, I took it back and purchased a “Live” and a separate 1Tb WD drive, and instead of attempting to copy it over the network I simply hooked up the drive and in 13 hrs copied the files to the drive…This time it has been “compiling” for 24 hrs…
I simply want a selection of music that will satisfy any request from any of our guests, or from my wife and myself…and I am always looking to expand that collection- especially early blues & jazz…
Hello
I had a similar Problem with a 2 terabyte hard drive. Had 50 gigs of music (mp3’s) on it and 100 gigs of movies. Would just say compiling, I notice on my hard drive the light would go out after a while. It must be the WD device must time out or something else goes weird with it. When I took the 50 gigs of music off the hard drive the unit work perfectly with the movies. I just use the unit for movies. The unit must have problems reading the music files. I would try and ask western digital if the have a suggestion.
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CollingsBob wrote:
I simply want a selection of music that will satisfy any request from any of our guests, or from my wife and myself…and I am always looking to expand that collection- especially early blues & jazz…
Kind of sounds like my collection – I have lots of both. I sort of “get away with” playing jazz when guests are here, but “early blues”? Not really; it’s an acquired taste, to be sure. I don’t think guests would appreciate a lot of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Skip James, Big Joe Williams, Robert Petway, Lonnie Johnson, etc, etc! (OK. I might get some Lonnie Johnson to be acceptable by guests.)
This morning I deleted slightly more than 35 gig of music from the hard drive…re-connected it to the WD box, and left for work…lets see how it does with less music to compile…
I like to have different music for different moods…AC/DC or the Cult while I’m getting ready for work…Adele or any of the 60’s girl groups if my wife is at home…and anything from Big Mama Thornton to Katy Perry if we have friends over…music is addictive - I’m always looking to add…
If you want more music at reasonable prices, (i.e. lor lots less than Amazon and iTunes store) then check out eMusic. I’ve been a member for years.
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It has now been “compiling” for 24 hrs…Ill give it another 24, then Ill disconnect the hard drive (again…), reduce the amount of music on the hard drive and try again…This is turning into a joke
I can’t tell from reading your posts, do you have the media library turned on or not? I woudl try turning it off, rebooting and see what happens.
-P
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Unit would not respond to the remote…unplugged the hard drive, unplugged the unit, then plugged it back in again…Media Library is turned on…deleted some music from the hard drive…start process again…
The hard drive is formated NTFS…is that correct?..or should it be Fat32?
NTFS is fine, you can’t store files > 4 GB on FAT32.
CollingsBob wrote:
…Media Library is turned on…deleted some music from the hard drive…start process again…
You seem extremely hesitant to turn off the media library. I know I have mentioned this a few times so I’ll drop the issue from here, but it is probably the first thing I would try for troubleshooting based on the symptoms you are seeing with continuous disk access. With the ML off, boot and see if you can play your music files. You can easily turn it back on. At least you would know if that is what is causing your problems.
Nuff’ said and Good Luck
-P
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CollingsBob wrote:
The hard drive is formated NTFS…is that correct?..or should it be Fat32?
Bob, excuse me for being blunt here, but anyone with a media player’s drive (that usually holds many files over 4GB) knows that FAT 32 (because of its limitation of not handling files over 4GB), is inappropriate, and knows the drive used must be formatted NTFS. Also, since you seem to be ignoring advice from quite a few people, and instead of putting a GB or so on the new media player drive to give it a good test run, you want to swallow the whole 800GB elephant at once, makes me wonder if you are over your head with this entire process. I really hope not, and wish you the best of luck with it all. I have run out of suggestions for you.
