Tag writing inefficient?

[Lukáš Lalinský]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Elias Probst<mail at eliasprobst.eu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've noticed some trouble when re-tagging some of my FLAC albums using Amarok.
> Updating the tags of a single FLAC album takes up to 10 minutes, because my
> music collection is stored on a NFS share on my fileserver where I connect to
> via WLAN.
>
> When writing now the tags, it seems the whole FLAC files are transferred to my
> client and back again to the server.
>
> Doesn't it suffice just rewriting the header of the file containing the metadata?
> Is it really necessary to rewrite the whole file?
>
> As I don't have the slightest clue about the technical details when it comes
> to writing tags to files, I actually might be wrong, but maybe some of the devs
> or people with a little more knowledge of this topic could discuss, what to do
> here.

There is a padding block in FLAC files, that can be used for this
purpose. TagLib 1.5 and older doesn't know how to use this, and has to
resize the file every time. TagLib 1.6 (still to be released, there is
RC out) will use the padding block if it's there and is large enough
to hold the tags, so in most cases it will not need to resize the
file.

-- 
Lukas Lalinsky
lalinsky at gmail.com