Post by gedas on Jan 12, 2017 19:47:08 GMT
One of the few annoying things about PhaseShift is the lack of song library caching function. Which means, if you point the game to the root of your collection, it will re-scan every time you launch the game. That's bad and it shouldn't happen.
However, one might ask themselves -- what's the point of doing so, that is letting the game go through your entire collection every time. Because chances are, upon starting playing one has pretty good idea what genre, artist, album or random songs they would like to play through.
So... I thought long and and hard (not really) how to fix this and make it comfortable to use the game while still having and maintaining a relatively large collection of songs. Here's what I have come up with.
For starters, Pic #1. My own collection (roughly 10,000 songs)
In the configuration file I have the game configured to use dummy folder as its music root directory. And every time before starting PhaseShift I simply create junction mount points which point to actual folders containing the songs.
To browse the collection I'm using Total Commander and I've also written a custom helper command to be able to create junctions for every selected dir. Here comes Pic #2.
So choosing songs literally takes seconds before launching the game! Not only does the game start instantly, it's also much more comfortable to navigate through a small list of songs in-game.
And I have also written myself some scripts for maintaining this huge collection. One of which is PhaseShift songs renamer. It comes very handy after downloading/converting a bunch of songs from various sources and merging them into my library. This script digs deep into every subdir, scans songs.ini file, renames folder, checks for duplicates and even for possibly non working songs (useful after converting RB3_con's).
However, one might ask themselves -- what's the point of doing so, that is letting the game go through your entire collection every time. Because chances are, upon starting playing one has pretty good idea what genre, artist, album or random songs they would like to play through.
So... I thought long and and hard (not really) how to fix this and make it comfortable to use the game while still having and maintaining a relatively large collection of songs. Here's what I have come up with.
For starters, Pic #1. My own collection (roughly 10,000 songs)
In the configuration file I have the game configured to use dummy folder as its music root directory. And every time before starting PhaseShift I simply create junction mount points which point to actual folders containing the songs.
To browse the collection I'm using Total Commander and I've also written a custom helper command to be able to create junctions for every selected dir. Here comes Pic #2.
So choosing songs literally takes seconds before launching the game! Not only does the game start instantly, it's also much more comfortable to navigate through a small list of songs in-game.
And I have also written myself some scripts for maintaining this huge collection. One of which is PhaseShift songs renamer. It comes very handy after downloading/converting a bunch of songs from various sources and merging them into my library. This script digs deep into every subdir, scans songs.ini file, renames folder, checks for duplicates and even for possibly non working songs (useful after converting RB3_con's).