Ok, I just learned that reading directions is actually useful sometimes. I have about 1.2TB of disk space in the Media PC right now (TB stands for TeraBytes people. That comes after GB or Giga Bytes…it is a lot). I have about 56k songs on here and I have a few hundred CDs that I have not even burned yet. Plus, things like iTunes make it super easy to buy music…especially when just about any album you could want is $10. Anyway, back to optimizing the library in Media Player 10. After I had about 5k songs in my library I started to see some lag when I fired up MP10 and/or when I selected “All Music” which lists all of the songs I have on my computer. To add music files to the Media Player library you have to go to Tools -> Options -> Library Tab -> Monitor Folders to tell MP10 which folders or drives to look in for music and/or other media file types. One of the things Media Player tells you NOT to do is list the root directory as a folder to monitor. Of course I ignored this when I first setup the computer and MP10. I have separate drives for Music, Movies and Applications (now I have multiple for Music and Movies). I simply selected the root directory (in other words just told MP10 to look in F:\ or Drive F for files) for each one and moved on. Well, now that I am up to nearly 60k mp3 files, 250 movies and about 50 hours of television programs, the library can take upwards of a few minutes to load. Yesterday I went on a mission to see if I could speed things up. I simply created a directory on each of the drives and moved all of the files into them and then removed the root directories from the monitor list and added the new folders/directories to the monitor list. Media Player now loads the entire library in seconds, even with “All Music” selected.

So, if you are a tech dork like me or you simply have a ton of media files on your computer, be sure NOT to place those files in the root directory of any of the hard drives on your computer. One of the other things I did was to remove any media files from the standard “My Pictures” and “My Music” folders on my computer and removed monitoring of those folders as well. I am sure not having to monitor the system drive for files is also helpful as well when it comes to performance.

For those of you looking to improve the library functionality in Media Center, this will help you as well. MCE or Media Center Edition of Windows XP uses Media Player to manage media files on the computer.