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First Impressions on Upgrading to 5.1
There are no instructions for the upgrade procedure. mville was kind enough to provide links and suggestions on how to proceed. IMHO, it's the developer's job to provide such information (eg, whether to un-install the older version first; how to preserve customizations, etc). It shouldn't be left to the user to dig through the forums to find out what to do.
I un-installed the previous version, restarted, installed 5.1, and restarted again. Registration and most preferences survived un-installing the older version, so all I had to do was to set the new prefs (eg, regarding DSFs).
Asset proceeded to re-build the database, and it was no faster than R4.3. However, I assume the bottleneck here is the storage medium and its connection to the server, so that was to be expected.
Asset Configuration retained the same interface, which is comforting.
The R5.1 database text dump now includes the file path, which can come in very handy when locating files with dodgy tags. But, other than that, I did not find any new features of interest to me in R5.1.
But I did come across a couple of annoyances.
First, the icon issue. That's easily solved by deleting or renaming the AssetImages folder.
The second one is a little more complicated, and it has to do with how quickly the browse tree supplied by Asset is loaded.
For instance, say I navigate with a control point to Artist/Album >> [T]. The first time I do this, loading the T index takes quite a long time, longer than it did in R4.3. (This is an impression -- I did not think of timing this prior to upgrading, so I have no hard facts.) But any subsequent loading (for instance, if I go to [T], then to [F], then back to [T]) takes much less time than it used to.
It's as if, when an index is first accessed, Asset created and saved a cache, and it served that cache to subsequent requests.
Be that as it may, unfortunately, that translates to a disappointing user experience for me. That's because, as a rule, I do not flit from index to index, and consequently using R5.1 is, for me, significantly slower than using R4.3.
I suspect an additional problem could also linked to this issue. On the Mac, I use XBMC as controller. It worked fine with R4.3, but not so with R5.1. It's OK with most indices, but, if I point it a large index, e.g., Artist/Album >> [All Artists], it fails to load it. It just goes, "Working" and eventually nothing happens. My surmise is that XBMC has some kind of time-out, which kicks in because R5.1 takes longer than R4.3 to provide the data. But I may be completely wrong, of course.
So, overall, my first impression of upgrading to R5.1 is negative. The text dump file path does not compensate for the much more frequent frustration over the slow loading of indices. For my purposes, I should've stayed with R4.3, and I wonder if a downgrade is feasible.
There are no instructions for the upgrade procedure. mville was kind enough to provide links and suggestions on how to proceed. IMHO, it's the developer's job to provide such information (eg, whether to un-install the older version first; how to preserve customizations, etc). It shouldn't be left to the user to dig through the forums to find out what to do.
I un-installed the previous version, restarted, installed 5.1, and restarted again. Registration and most preferences survived un-installing the older version, so all I had to do was to set the new prefs (eg, regarding DSFs).
Asset proceeded to re-build the database, and it was no faster than R4.3. However, I assume the bottleneck here is the storage medium and its connection to the server, so that was to be expected.
Asset Configuration retained the same interface, which is comforting.
The R5.1 database text dump now includes the file path, which can come in very handy when locating files with dodgy tags. But, other than that, I did not find any new features of interest to me in R5.1.
But I did come across a couple of annoyances.
First, the icon issue. That's easily solved by deleting or renaming the AssetImages folder.
The second one is a little more complicated, and it has to do with how quickly the browse tree supplied by Asset is loaded.
For instance, say I navigate with a control point to Artist/Album >> [T]. The first time I do this, loading the T index takes quite a long time, longer than it did in R4.3. (This is an impression -- I did not think of timing this prior to upgrading, so I have no hard facts.) But any subsequent loading (for instance, if I go to [T], then to [F], then back to [T]) takes much less time than it used to.
It's as if, when an index is first accessed, Asset created and saved a cache, and it served that cache to subsequent requests.
Be that as it may, unfortunately, that translates to a disappointing user experience for me. That's because, as a rule, I do not flit from index to index, and consequently using R5.1 is, for me, significantly slower than using R4.3.
I suspect an additional problem could also linked to this issue. On the Mac, I use XBMC as controller. It worked fine with R4.3, but not so with R5.1. It's OK with most indices, but, if I point it a large index, e.g., Artist/Album >> [All Artists], it fails to load it. It just goes, "Working" and eventually nothing happens. My surmise is that XBMC has some kind of time-out, which kicks in because R5.1 takes longer than R4.3 to provide the data. But I may be completely wrong, of course.
So, overall, my first impression of upgrading to R5.1 is negative. The text dump file path does not compensate for the much more frequent frustration over the slow loading of indices. For my purposes, I should've stayed with R4.3, and I wonder if a downgrade is feasible.