Wishlist: Disk space warning (and limit?) for analysis files

[Ilkka Tuohela]

 Analyzing a large music library can take significant amount of disk space. This may be a problem for non-technical users, who don't know to look at their mixxx application data directory, which is not easy to find for such people.

In mixxx 1.11, the analysis waveform files seem to be on average 250-500kB for a "normal" song, my largest analysis file is 18MB for a full album remix track.

 We may want to do multiple things for this:
- document the potential disk space usage properly
- have a warning about disk space in the library scanner dialog and analysis queue
- show disk usage and free space in "analysis" window header
- monitor free space on the drive with analysis files and pause analyzing new files if we go below certain free space threshold, giving a dialog for user

It might be also good idea to be able to set your analysis data directory, if you need to. I moved my data to another disk and symlinked it to correct place, but this is not enduser solution.

[Sean M. Pappalardo (pegasus-renegadetech)]

An alternative idea would be to do like Serato Scratch Live or DJ Intro does: the track waveform is generated on-the-fly such that each time you seek, it renders a fresh waveform two pixel columns forward, one behind, two forward, one behind, and so on to the edges of the screen, then to some buffer size limit. As the deck plays (in either direction) it renders to keep up. (I would imagine it stops if the deck is stopped as long as the on-screen section is fully rendered.) The advantages of that approach are 1) no disk space needed, 2) no waiting for analysis since it's going on continuously.

[RJ Skerry-Ryan (rryan)]

The disadvantage to this approach is that Mixxx would be constantly
expending CPU filtering the waveform in 3-bands for visual display.

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Sean M. Pappalardo <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> An alternative idea would be to do like Serato Scratch Live or DJ Intro
> does: the track waveform is generated on-the-fly such that each time you
> seek, it renders a fresh waveform two pixel columns forward, one behind,
> two forward, one behind, and so on to the edges of the screen, then to
> some buffer size limit. As the deck plays (in either direction) it
> renders to keep up. (I would imagine it stops if the deck is stopped as
> long as the on-screen section is fully rendered.) The advantages of that
> approach are 1) no disk space needed, 2) no waiting for analysis since
> it's going on continuously.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mixxx
> Development Team, which is subscribed to Mixxx.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1023787
>
> Title:
> Wishlist: Disk space warning for analysis files
>
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[Max Linke (max-linke)]

How about we move the analysis files into the library/mixxx folder ? This would show to the end-user that we actually use diskspace for analysed tracks and it's easy for them to see how much diskspace is used by them. In case the file is deleted we could just calculate it again and actually save it again.

This would also make it easier later to support transportable libraries since we only have to care about merging information in the sql files and not about file copying.

[RJ Skerry-Ryan (rryan)]

I added a cached waveform info section to Preferences -> Waveforms.

https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/commit/59a78fae01b276592187b7cb726ab5dbf4e6c00c

It tells the user how much space is used on disk by them, allows them to clear all of them, and disable caching on disk entirely.

[RJ Skerry-Ryan (rryan)]

This bug is still not solved though -- maybe we could expand the scope to watch the user's disk in general and warn when running out of space. I think Mixxx will probably either crash or fail badly (corrupt SQLite?) when we're out of space.

Storing the files alongside the tracks would be a nice option -- though I think littering without permission isn't good :). As a user I would be worried about the difference between transient / cached data and track metadata (e.g. my beatgrids).

I wouldn't want to delete a file unless I knew it was only the former not the latter. The fix I added makes it clear this is a waveform-specific "cached" analysis and the clear button is in Preferences -> Waveform. I wanted to emphasize that it wouldn't delete anything important.

[RJ Skerry-Ryan (rryan)]

Some discussion in this vein:
https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/pull/1006

[ronso0 (ronso0)]

Low/no disk space caused some headaches again yesterday on a friend's coputer: Mixxx wouldn't allow loading songs into decks.
A 'Low disk space' warning would be really helpful when Mixxx can't create waveform files.

[Swiftb0y (swiftb0y)]

Mixxx now uses GitHub for bug tracking. This bug has been migrated to:
https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/issues/6573