Saved Singers list AKA singers.dat

[Fabio]

In case anyone has problems with the saved singers list where your saves for a new song are slow or starting VDJ takes a long time or even switching from singer to singer as you're searching.  Or as in my case it stops vdj from starting (it locks up in the splash screen).  I might have found a solution.

In my case I thought it was a corruption or fragmentation of the singers.dat file. I ended up removing it from the folder (I copied it to a folder on my desktop) since VDJ ends up recreating when you add a new singer.  The problem is that after adding just a single singer, it would work, but it was still very slow in saving it and slow in starting VDJ.  (It would sit in the splash screen for longer than before). Also trying to restore a previous backup would work, but the slowness would return.

Out of a hunch, I ended downloading CCleaner (https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download) and ran the cleaner for basically everything, (all browsers, registry, empty recycle bin, temporary files, memory dumps, chkdsk file fragments, windows log files, recent documents, thumbnail cache and even clipboard).  I'm not sure which of these did the trick, but after cleaning everything seems to have gone back to working normally.  I was able to restore my backed up singers.dat and it loaded normally.  To tell the truth, I'm not sure which of these different "cleannings" did the trick, but it worked.  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the browsers probably didn't have to be done and probably emptying the recycle bin and clearing the clipboard either.  If you have to do this uncheck the browsers as those will probably don't need to be done and you're likely to get logged out of sites and loose open tabs and even have malfunctioning plugins (a couple of my plugins had to be re-installed -lastpass was one of them)

I guess I should have cleaned different parts and test after running each to figure out what really made it work normally again but that will have to wait until the happens again. 

By the way the free version of this program was enough.

[Justin]

My guess would be the registry or temp files. If the registry is full of garbage (which happens over time, some programs don't clean up even when uninstalled) it will slow a lot of things down. The temp folder gets crowded easily as well if a program doesn't use it correctly. When you create and use a temporary file, it is supposed to be flagged so that the system automatically deletes the file when the application terminates (expectedly or otherwise).

The current version of VDJ does this correctly I believe, but I know I did some further work in the new version that implicitly deletes temp files on close, and the uninstaller cleans all VDJ-related registry entries (except for the license key, which you can wipe on reinstall if desired).

Glad you got it figured out Fabio! I've been using CCleaner for years, it's on my keychain flash drive with my password recovery tools, AVG free, etc. You know, for those times you're at a relative or friend's house and get the inevitable "Can you take a look at my computer?"...

Regarding the temp folder, note that any single folder with too many files will cause Windows to be very slow to access. It is exponentially proportionate to the number of files within the folder. Notice that while indexing songs, it will be slower on folders containing many individual files - nothing I can do to speed that up, it's a general filesystem thing. Unfortunately the temp folder is shared among many other programs, so if it gets full of thousands of files, it will be slow when creating/accessing any file within that folder.

PS - I'm going to look into that part of the code and see exactly what part is slowing down when you add a new song... I don't think it has anything to do with the singers.dat file itself, but something I'm doing internally when a new song is added...

[Fabio]

My guess would be the registry or temp files.

Yup, that would be my guess too.

I'm going to look into that part of the code and see exactly what part is slowing down when you add a new song

 

Yeah, that part was always  slow-ish.

Speaking of the saved singer list:
Eventually it would be nice to be able to search within a singers list, specially for those singers with large lists.  Also, it would be helpful to display (different color maybe?) those songs which are no longer linked to the original file (if it was moved or renamed).  A couple of months ago I went through my karaoke songs and added "(duet)" for all those songs with duets.  It makes it easier on the web app for someone looking for duets and I'm sure it broke the links on some of those saved songs.  Specially since I still find duet songs that still need to be renamed as well as general spelling mistakes here and there.