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Forum: VirtualDJ Technical Support

Sujet: Advice needed before flattening folder structure
Hi guys,

Like most people I have many sub folders with all kinds of categories. I'm about to flatten my entire folder structure to D:\***\ to enable the use of some new playlisting tools ( i use VDJ to playout not live DJ). At first the flattening will be copies so as not to break existing playlists, but eventually I want everything flat. Is there any good advice on this move that will prevent my breaking of things? i7 Win 10 pro 5TB SSD, 12,000 videos 3Tb.
 
Posté 3 days ago @ 7:59 am
If you move the folders and tracks using VDJ, then VDJ will know about the movement and adjust the database and lists accordingly
However I don't think the old school .m3u lists will get updated
 
M3U lists still get updated.

However a flat folder with 12000 video files, is a terrible idea.
Not for VirtualDJ itself.
But for the drive.
 
PhantomDeejay wrote :
M3U lists still get updated.

However a flat folder with 12000 video files, is a terrible idea.
Not for VirtualDJ itself.
But for the drive.


Hi Phantom,

Thanks for your comment, can you explain, I'm scared shitless to do it, so can you tell me why it might be bad for the drive?

Thanks a lot

Mike
 
klausmogensen wrote :
If you move the folders and tracks using VDJ, then VDJ will know about the movement and adjust the database and lists accordingly
However I don't think the old school .m3u lists will get updated


Thank you Klaus and cheers for all the videos over the years,

Mike
 
It is not bad for the drive as such, but it may slow down Windows Explorer a lot if you need to browse or sort files within the folder. (For some sort options windows tries to read the files to see if there's a date in the tag for example, which with many files slows down considerably. Also for thumbnails windows is not very fast)
For use within VirtualDJ it shouldn't matter much if it's a single folder or multiple folders.
 
Simply put, Windows explorer with default settings will have a hard time to open a folder with 12000 videos and display it's contents.

There are multiple reasons for that, such as the thumbs.db file that windows always create with thumbnails of the files, and/or some data that explorer tries to display when it detects that the folder contains video files.
For instance Windows Explorer wants to be able to display the "duration" of each video file as a detail when you click on a file, or in a separate column if detailed view is on. But in order to do so it needs to open each single file and read/cache some data. Unfortunately it does not do it "on demand" (when you click the file) but "before hand"
So, opening thousands of video files just to gather some metadata kills performance.

Generally speaking, if you check around forums that deal with media files (being music or video) you'll find out that the best practice is to keep the number of files per folder under a reasonable amount.
The exact amount of files is big debate but the general consent for video files is to stay under a thousand files per folder, while for audio you can go up to two or three thousands per folder.
Yes, it is absolutely possible to exceed those numbers. Your computer won't explode. But you may gradually start noticing some degradation in file operations performance, especially with Windows Explorer.

PS: VirtualDJ itself doesn't have any issue with the number of files per folder as it uses it's own database to display information about the files. Just DON'T make the filedate column visible :P