WMP Just reads and reads and reads hard disk

[Jawed]

So this is a picture of the disk reads/writes on my PC:

I happen to have Windows Media Player playing music, and according to the process listing, WMP has so far read 72GB of data. It's only been playing music for about 2 hours.

Why's it just reading the hard disk, trashing disk cache at this enormous rate? What Microsoft lunacy is this?

Jawed

 

[Albuquerque]

What version of WMP, which flavor of Windows, and what kind of source media (WMA, WMV, MP3, AC3, bitrate, et al.)

I have WMP11 on Vista Enterprise 32 here at the office, and it never looks like that. Most of my music library is WMA 320kbps VBR.

 

[Jawed]

XP-SP3, WMP11, WMAs of "maximum lossy quality", e.g. current track is 314kbps.

Jawed

 

[rendezvous]

My guess is that it is trying to build up a library with all your media.

There are a couple of settings under "Library" that you could check out.

 

[Davros]

what program is that ?

 

[dZeus]

seconded, I would be very interested to monitor disk access on my Vista install using a program that produces graphs as in the thread starter's post!

 

[Jawed]

So, I went in to Library and saw that it was set to monitor "My Personal Folders" - so I changed that to "My folders and those of others that I can access" and set "Documents and Settings" to Ignore and left "Documents and Settings\...\My Music" set to Rip folder. Those are now the only two entries there.

It then set about reading the entire music library. It scanned 15425 files and added 18. Amazingly it was reading the IDE disk at a sustained ~85MB/s, way faster than I've ever seen any of my disks sustain So, anyway, it read through the entire 154GB of music.

So I Closed and OK'd the Library dialogs and restarted WMP.

It's still behaving the same way It only seems to read the disk when playing music. With WMP started and no music playing it read about 1.4GB from disk and then stopped. As soon as I started playing an album it then started reading from disk.

Is it just going to try to read the entire 154GB of files in My Music every time it starts?

I don't see how it's possible to tell it not to monitor folders. The rip folder cannot be removed from the list of monitored folders.

Oh and that graph comes from Process Explorer:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Jawed

 

[Malo]

seconded, I would be very interested to monitor disk access on my Vista install using a program that produces graphs as in the thread starter's post!

It's called Vista

 

[Davros]

No its not its called Process Explorer now stop being silly

ps: Jawed use another media player

 

[Jawed]

ps: Jawed use another media player

No thanks, I like WMP's taskbar widget.

Jawed

 

[Brad Grenz]

Doesn't iTunes have one just like it? Right click on the taskbar and under toolbars you can enable one for iTunes.

 

[Jawed]

Doesn't iTunes have one just like it? Right click on the taskbar and under toolbars you can enable one for iTunes.

I don't like the way Apple software tried to take over my PC when I used it.

Jawed

 

[Bludd]

Jawed, have you tried running Process Monitor to see what WMP is actually doing?

 

[Jawed]

I can see it (using Process Explorer's tab for per process details) opening then closing each folder which contains music, and it appears to be progressing alphabetically.

It's like it's stuck in an infinite loop scanning the library

I wonder if it's something to do with my user account having no password? I can rate tracks and generally WMP functions fine.

Jawed