Hi there. Hopefully you're not pissing it off too bad 🙂 It probably would take it out on me!

I just dragged over my Various Artists folder which loaded 4130 tracks. I added a bunch of other tracks which got it up to 6209. I did a Command-A to select all the files and Yate froze for about 5 seconds while it accumulated all the data. I then right clicked and selected 'link to iTunes' which took about a minute during which time the UI was responsive.

I'm assuming that you have already loaded your 6k files and then somehow selected them all at which point you are seeing a freeze before the files get selected? The freeze should end after a few seconds. If it does not then something strange is happening and we'll have to look deeper. Unfortunately this will involve narrowing down what is selected. Each time you change the file selection in Yate it has to recalculate the set of values which get displayed in the editing panels.

While we do have users that edit their tracks by the 'load 'er all up method' I personally prefer the smaller loaded set is better method. (and believe me I've edited my personal 40k tracks hundreds of times).

The linkage to iTunes is transient and only lasts while the files are open in Yate. There is no benefit to loading thousands of tracks at the same time unless there is common editing to be done over all the tracks.

Loading an album at a time gives you more granularity and there is far less chance to inadvertently mess up tracks you selected in error.

You can either load up a folder (or all albums for an artist) at a time or you can simply drag a track from iTunes into Yate which will load all tracks in the same album. (only the dragged files will be pre-linked).

I suggest you operate in this manner and build up an action which performs the basic editing steps that you want to perform over all your tracks. I've been refining my 'goto' action for about six months now and I'm sure I'll continue to tweak it in the future. Just for your information I have a series of nested actions which edit my tracks saving the changes to iTunes, unless it's a new album in which case the tracks are also added to iTunes, moved to a NAS drive and added to my Album Database. Doing this over a smaller set of files allows you to better see the changes and to revert if you're not happy.

Once you have your actions defined, you can run it and all your tracks through the Batch Processor Wizard and edit them all on a single run.

Hopefully your freeze has ended by this point. 🙂 If not, let me know and we'll discuss more detailed troubleshooting.

All I can think of is it depends on processor speed. Whenever the selection changes, Yate has to save the current values for each field for each selected track. This is how it defines the 'edit state' which is undoable by all those checkboxes in the UI. It also has to calculate the unique values across every field to display in the UI. I will look at the code again.

I have spent the better part of today profiling the file selection code. It turns out the major bottleneck while selecting thousands of files is the accumulation of the User Defined Text Information items so that only unique items will be displayed in the inline table on the More Info tab. It is also possible that accumulating the User Defined URLs could have the same effect but in practice there are far fewer of these items.

I have done a number of things to make the user experience better. Firstly I was able to speed up the process by about 20% by some code changes.

I've also added a spinner to show that the activity is taking place.

I've also added a Preferences-File List option to control how much data is displayed in those inline tables. The options are: All (essentially the same as today), if only one file is selected or if up to one hundred files are selected. In my testing with 4500 files being selected the display recovered in under one second if the new option was not set to All.

Thanks for letting me now about this annoyance. The fix will be in the upcoming v2.2 release.