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SS works for one user but not another

Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2010 8:55 pm
by R B Oliveros
Otherwise, Song Sergeant is great; seems to be exactly what I've needed for years. It rescued my primary iTunes library today.

However, I have several accounts on a Mac Mini running 10.5.8. One of the accounts is used to maintain my iTunes backup library, which resides on an external disk. It also needs help, but I cannot run Song Sgt when I am logged on to the second account. It just goes poof! and disappears leaving no window or message or anything. Help!

Incidentally, near the end of fixing my primary iTunes library, I came across a strange situation: A set of files appeared as duplicates, disappeared properly after merging them, then reappeared after a subsequent scan. I finally dug into the iTunes files and discovered that the library had duplicate pointers pointing to one physical file in each case. Never seen that before (that I know of).

re: SS works for one user but not another

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 12:58 am
by beastie
SS works for one user but not another

Otherwise, Song Sergeant is great; seems to be exactly what I've needed for years. It rescued my primary iTunes library today.

However, I have several accounts on a Mac Mini running 10.5.8. One of the accounts is used to maintain my iTunes backup library, which resides on an external disk. It also needs help, but I cannot run Song Sgt when I am logged on to the second account. It just goes poof! and disappears leaving no window or message or anything. Help!
Switching between multiple iTunes libraries is not normally a problem for Song Sergeant, so I'm afraid that I don't understand exactly what's going on. If you could enumerate exactly what the setup is here, we might be able to reproduce the problem and find a solution.

A likely issue is that file permissions problems in iTunes often crop up when different user accounts on the same machine are used to work with the same iTunes library.
Incidentally, near the end of fixing my primary iTunes library, I came across a strange situation: A set of files appeared as duplicates, disappeared properly after merging them, then reappeared after a subsequent scan. I finally dug into the iTunes files and discovered that the library had duplicate pointers pointing to one physical file in each case. Never seen that before (that I know of).
This I have heard of, as we needed to make a change to cope with this for an earlier version (1.0.4). You aren't supposed to need to dig around in iTunes to resolve these anymore, so could provide some more details here too?

Leon

More details

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 8:42 am
by R B Oliveros
I'm using SongSergeant 1.1.1.

I don't take naturally to iTunes. My mind works like a spreadsheet, not a database. Whatever I try to do in iTunes, I always seem to choose the wrong (non-iTunes) way; I have been fighting it for years. I am open to suggestions about a better way of accomplishing my goals.

Goal: To have my entire iTunes media collection archived on an external drive which is usually offline and may be attached to any of 4 or 5 different Macs. I want to retain associated information such as rating, play count, album art, etc. Also, to maintain a much smaller primary iTunes library on the computer I am actually using most; this library is the original port of entry for content. I copy new content from the primary library to the archive via playlists.

Set-up: primary library is currently on the 111.8 GB internal drive of a Mac mini 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running 10.5.8. Archive library is on an 111.5 GB Western Passport (? I think that's what it was called. I've had it awhile.) Primary library used to be on a 37 GB internal drive of a 1 Ghz Powerbook G4 running 10.4.11. All the other computers in the house are on 10.4.11. This is the first time I have tried to archive from the Mini with 10.5.8.

The reason I use 2 user accounts to do the archiving is that iTunes seems to think it knows too much about the 2 libraries and setting the iTunes Media folder location just doesn't work like I expect it to. I don't want the archive to know anything more about the primary than is contained in the playlist and vice-versa.

Digging - I simply used "Show in Finder" for each of the duplicate pairs and found identical paths. I do it that way because duplicates (pre-SongSergeant) usually happened because an entire album was in as both a Compilation and as a non-Compilation. If that was the case, I could fix the entire album in one operation. As for how the situation (two pointers to the same object) happened, I don't know. I started trying to do the archiving very late the previous night (dumb) and got my libraries so messed up I thought they were ruined. Which they would have been without Song Sergeant.

A general, different but related, question: I'm about to have to deal with 4 different people's libraries which may or may not be in different locations. Do I consolidate everything on a music server? I don't even want to see most of the other people's stuff, and they feel the same. If I access other people's music with library sharing, I don't seem to be able to playlist it to my iPod. I haven't tried Home Sharing, but it seems to make multiple copies & scatter them out to libraries. That's not ideal. Guidance in this matter will be greatly appreciated.

Re: Runs for one user but not another

Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 1:07 am
by beastie
Thanks for emailing in the log. There was indeed a misconfiguration of permissions on the Song Sergeant 1.1.1 disk image. Please trash what you've got and download the current version (1.1.2).

I'll digest your goal and setup, and will follow up here.

multiple user accounts

Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 9:12 pm
by m0e
Rather than start a new topic I decided to post here since I have a similar problem.
I purchased a license to Song Sergeant and the program has done what I have wanted it to do (clean up a library of over 21,000 songs) on my user account, but when I tried to use it on my wife's user account (on the same computer) it asked for registration information again. Is it possible to use Song Sergeant on multiple user accounts or do I need a license for each account?

Re: multiple user accounts

Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2010 12:41 am
by beastie
Re-entering the same registration details on another account on your machine is fine.

Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2010 12:46 am
by m0e
Thanks for the prompt reply.