re: Size of music library causing Zune to hang at startup?

Hey all.  First off: Zune 4.0 is a great app.  I greatly prefer it to iTunes now and use it daily.  But I do have one annoyance that I'm hoping for clarification on.

I have to laptop computers.  On my main computer, my music library is ~12,000 songs and about 75GB.  On my work computer, I have about ~1,100 songs.  Both are running Windows 7 Pro (x64), w/4GB of ram.  All songs have album art, and basic song information (name, artist, album, track #).

What I'm noticing is this: When I restart my main computer and boot Zune 4.0 for the first time, the app turns on and is controllable for maybe 2 seconds after the menu screen appears...then it hangs for 20-25 seconds, depending on what the HDD is doing at the time.  During this time, I can't do anything with Zune.  I can't move the window.  I can't change menus within the window.  Then, it "wakes up" such that I can control it fully and start songs without a problem.  It does not do this on my work computer, which has a significanly slower HDD (PATA vs. SATA in Raid 0).  When I turn it on via that machine, it immediately works.

I guess I just wanted to confim that the Zune app is indeed trying to gather the album art data or fully open the database of songs and gets stuck for a time trying to load all of that up at once...or whether there was something I could enable or disable to prevent this from happening?  It's annoying when it happens because it's so antithetical to the consistency and quality of the app.  iTunes doesn't do this.  Windows Media Player doesn't do this.  In fact, WMP is fully ready to play in about 6 seconds.  iTunes is fully ready in about 11 seconds.  But Zune 4.0...it's literally 20-25 seconds.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd live to hear them.  Thanks!

dang...nobody?  guess I'm just special.

Looks like it may be your PC I'm afraid. Running Win7 x64 (Ultimate) 3Gb. All my songs have Album Art and are reasonably well tagged (I use Helium music manager - probably the best) on top if which a big percentage of "my" music is lyriced as well.

Currently running with 1457 Albums and 18861 tracks - Thats my music (> 35 years of collecting and all albums now digitised) + my wife's and two son's collections as well.

Zune 4.0 starts up instantly and is usable straight away. How many folders is it trying to monitor - I use a single Music folder root with albums under artists. One thing may be to look at the search and indexing within Windows 7 as I believe it uses that to build the library.

 

How interesting.  I'm not sure what to look at with regards to the indexing.  I know it is still indexing, as it always finds new music I've added.  and like I said, after the initial boot of the app, it works fine.  If I close the Zune app, then re-open it later, it opens and runs instantly.  No pausing of any kind.  I suppose that's what makes it frustrating. 

As for your question: it's monitoring 7 folders (My Music, Public Music, My Videos, Public Videos, Podcasts, My Pictures, Public Pictures).

Nothing special.  No more than Windows Media Player is monitoring, and that app doesn't pause.