Browsing media in explorer

[MGKelly]

It's difficult for me to word this question.

 

Basically, I have half a terrabyte of music, broken into several folders based on genre. Whenever I open one of the genre folders, Windows inexplicably takes 15 seconds to open the folder.

 

If I set the view to non music, It takes significantly less time. it's as if XP is trying to catalog everything in the folder each time I open it. I sooooo don't want this stupid "feature" is there any way I can fix this to speed up access?

 

This is on a refreshed/no spyware machine with a XP SP2, dual core 3.6ghz p4, a fast seagate 500se sata drive, 2gb of ram, etc.

[Andavari]

I had more-or-less the same problem and figured out it was due to too many folders (well actually all artist folders) in the root of the My Music folder, possibly something to do with how Windows is caching or sorting the directories but I'm not sure. By simply alphabetizing everything in sub-folders (A-B-C, D-E-F, etc.) the result was no more lengthy delay opening the main folder or the sub-folders.

[Eldmannen]

Maybe Windows tries to read the ID3 tags of all the files.

 

If you select a file, you see in the statusbar, the Artist, Duration, Bitrate, etc...

[MGKelly]

Maybe Windows tries to read the ID3 tags of all the files.

 

If you select a file, you see in the statusbar, the Artist, Duration, Bitrate, etc...

 

 

 

I'm going to try Andavari's tip but is there a way to turn off the ID3 scanning feature? Something permanent that doesn't go back to default settings but Microsoft can't control their stupid registry.

[JohnDemolition]

if you want to disable explorer's tagging support, then do this.

 

go to Start > Run and type this in

"regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll"

 

this removes explorer's reading of mp3 tags(ID3), but it still retains the ability to make music folders. i don't see a point in doing that since there will be no change.