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search improvements (music)


Jägs

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I'm trying to transition off of Subsonic because it is getting long in the tooth, and Emby is the logical choice, since I already use it for videos.  While I know that music in Emby is very much a work in progress, one area I find it lacking—in comparison to Subsonic—is search, both in terms of performance and functionality:

  • Compared to Subsonic, Emby's search is significantly slower.  I actually created a separate user account in Emby that only has access to music in order to make it usable because when videos were included, it would take 10-20 seconds to search.  For just music, searches take  about 5-10 seconds, where Subsonic is, effectively instantaneous.
     
  • The search results seem to be limited to either artist or song.  When I try to combine the two, often I get no results.  For example, I have a lot of jazz and many artists cover jazz standards, such as "Autumn Leaves."  If I'm interested, say, in any recordings by Miles Davis, and type in "davis autumn leaves," Subsonic immediately returns the correct results (see first screenshot). 

    When enter the same search query into Emby, I get no results.  If I type in "miles autumn leaves," "autumn leaves davis," or "autumn leaves miles," similarly, I get no results in Emby, but the same results are returned in Subsonic.  It's only when I just input "autumn leaves" that I get any results, which is not particularly useful as I have 50+ recordings of "Autumn Leaves."  It also takes, consistently, 5-10 seconds to return these results.  Again, Subsonic, running on the same server, provides instantaneous results.

    NOTE:  99% of my music is tagged, almost all of it with MusicBrainz.  Some more esoteric recordings, bootlegs, and live performances are not always tagged.
     
  • A couple of other nice features to have would be:
     
    • a list view in search, instead of showing album art; I suspect this would also speed up the search results
       
    • the option to include bitrate/format in the format; this would be useful for a variety of scenarios (finding lower bitrate versions of songs, creating playlists, etc.)

Thanks you for your consideration!

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Edited by Jägs
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Sorry, I didn't mean to have this turn into a troubleshooting thread, so if you want to move it elsewhere, let me know.  That said, attached is my server log file.  A couple of notes:

  • I'm running 4.6.4.0 on an ASUSTOR AS5304T (Intel Gemini Lake Celeron J4105 Quad Core + 16GB of RAM) with the latest ADM (3.5.7.RJR1)
  • I rolled the log before starting my query
  • I did a query for "autumn leaves" which took 8.5s by my stopwatch
  • I did another query for "body and soul" which took 7.75s by my stopwatch
  • my music collection is on the larger side, but certainly not larger than some (~250,000 songs)

Running these same queries with Subsonic on the same server immediately after the searches in Emby yields effectively instant results—I hit enter to run the search query and the results flash immediately below the query (<0.5s).

Please let me know if you need any further information and thanks for looking into this!

embyserver.txt

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@LukeI don't recall for certain, but it was around the time I was trying out the beta releases of Emby that supported the composer tag, so within the last year.  As long as I can retain my playlists, I'm more than happy to rebuild it, if you think that would help.

In case it matters, I probably built my video database in early 2020, when I moved to a NAS.

Edited by Jägs
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Ok yes if you're willing to do that, the new database could be as much a 50% smaller and should perform better as a result of that.

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@Luke, I attempted to rebuild my database, based on the steps mentioned in another post:

  1. I shut down Emby
  2. I renamed "library.db" to "library.bak"
  3. I started Emby
  4. I scanned all libraries

It took over 48 hours to rebuild, but it finished yesterday.  For comparison, here are the file size differences now:

-rw-r--r--    1 emby     emby     1197686784 Sep  1 08:32 library.bak
-rw-r--r--    1 emby     emby     1094852608 Sep  4 21:54 library.db

So, while it is smaller, it's not significantly so—about 10%.  Regardless, I'm more worried about speed than database size, so I did the same test as before:  I searched for "autumn leaves."  Here are the results:

  • trial 1:  10.82s
  • trial 2:  7.84s
  • trial 3:  8.5s

NOTE:  this is with a user that only has access to the music library and I rolled the logs and waited for about a minute before running the test.  No other users were accessing Emby while running the test.

I've attached the server log.

I'd appreciate any suggestions to speed things up, especially if I didn't recreate the database correctly.

embyserver.txt

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yes, unfortunately.  I've attached screen recordings of doing the same search in Emby and Subsonic.  As you can see, Emby takes significantly longer than Subsonic, though they are both pointing at the same files and both are running on the same server.  Both of these were done on the local network from the same computer within seconds of each other.  I am using an Emby user that only has access to the music library, as it seems to be quicker than my main account that has access to everything.  I've also attached the server log file.

embyserver.txt

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  • 2 months later...

@LukeI was revisiting this based on conversations in a different thread and was wondering if the log yielded any insight as to what might be causing this slowness?  I'm still experiencing the issue and have been pretty methodical about keeping up with updates, hoping something might even partially resolve the slowness.

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  • 6 months later...
Jägs

Just checking in to see if there's been any progress on this?  I have the latest server version 4.7.5.0 and while speed has improved, my sample search from above "autumn leaves" still takes about seven seconds vs. the nearly instantaneous results from Subsonic.

On the search front, I still get zero results when I try to find a specific recording of "Autumn Leaves" from a musician (e.g., "davis autumn leaves").  It would be great if the search worked on title, performer, and composer fields simultaneously.

Finally, are there any plans to configure the search to use the new table view?  This might help speed up the results, at least in my particular use case.

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Hi, we are working on another round of performance improvements. Regarding search, maybe, but not by default.

Thanks for the feedback.

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  • 1 year later...

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