Oh, well. Yesterday I gave this version a try and imported most of my rather huge sample (~1.5 TiB in ~700k files) and Refill libraries (~138 GiB, including 26.5GiB R+ packs).
Here are my results:
After only a few hours of scanning it finished and resulted in a __ReasonIndex_v7 file of about 2.7 GiB.
Starting Reason 13.0.3 now takes about 4 minutes.
After a fresh start opening the browser has all locations flagged with a "re-scan pending" icon, but the search function works and returns results after a while (be patient, as there is no indication of the search actually working on the task).
The interface is rather spartan and boring.
Flat view is missing options for detailed information where a file is from (unless you reorganise your sample collection to just have single level directory structure for each sample set).
Re-scanning the locations seems to take ~1 hour.
So in comparison to (old) Loopcloud 5 I rate the new browser in R13 to be at a state of still being just barely useable for me. It is still very far behind when it comes to speed, UI and features when dealing with lots of samples.
Things that would really help:
- Add an indicator that a search query is (still) running (also needed when switching views from "Flat" to "Tree" and v.v.)
- add a waveform display with seek/scrub functionality
- Add more parent levels to flat view
- Add file size and duration and BPM to sample details
- custom tags
- use colours! (for icons, file types, waveform, tag families, etc.)
- make it go faster (if Loopcloud could/can do it, you can do it, too.)
In total from my software development POV the browser now seems to be at least at a state where it can be thought of as an MVP tech demo and ready for (internal) beta testing, but still pretty far from "production ready". It's a very good start, but further work is still very much needed. Maybe RS could just buy or collaborate with Loopmasters to get Loopcloud integrated or to learn a few of their implementation details.