LairWare Software

[kriro]

Hi,

Song Sergeant reports 1207 missing files in my library. Checking both, the XML export and in iTunes itself on some of the reportedly "missing" files, all are there: iTunes can play them, and doing a "Reveal in Finder" reveals the media file properly in my iTunes music folder at the place it should be.

How come that Song Sergeant still thinks those files are missing? I am glad I checked before deleting the entries in my library.

A hint at the problem might be that all of the reported songs have non-ASCII characters either in their file name, album name (which translates into a folder in the file path) or their artist name (which again translates into a folder in the path to the media file).

Might it be that Song Sergeant does not cope with non-ASCII characters in the path to the media file?

In what format does iTunes deliver the path to the media? Is it an URL? Because then there does seem something wrong in decoding the URL and translating it into a (probably native) file path.

My library resides on a NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS) that is accessed via AFP protocol. The Finder does get non-ASCII characters in paths right (they are displayed correctly). Might it be that the data is delivered in a different Unicode form than iTunes delivers the paths (decomposed vs. composed)? If that is the root problem, then the application probably needs to normalize the file path strings to the form AFP expects before actually trying to access the media file.

If that is not the problem, then it might be that my NAS does not follow AFP rules (which I do not hope), but after that I am clueless - and unfortunately cannot use the "Missing" feature of Song Sergeant.

Anyone else seeing problems here?

[Update]
Meanwhile, I checked my library with an evaluation copy of PowerTunes. That software did NOT report the "dead tracks" (SS: "missing") that Song Sergeant does, so I guess there actually is an issue with the Song Sergeant application.

-Christian

[beastie]

We found out about this one a couple of days ago and are working on reproducing it.

I'm sure that a fix will end up in the next 1.0.5 beta as soon as possible.
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[beastie]

kriro, by chance is your music location ("iTunes Media folder location" as defined in iTunes) the root directory of a volume?

The system function we're relying on to give us a list of everything in your music folder doesn't work properly at root volumes. We'll be changing to another function that doesn't suffer from this system bug, and I'll post here when this fix appears in the next beta -- probably within the next 24 hours.

Leon
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[beastie]

Sooner than I expected, a new beta is available which hopefully addressed kriro's problem (among other things):

http://lwupdate.dyndns.org/SongSergeant-beta.zip
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[jmcp]

Is the above beta been approved yet? I have the same problem on my macbook.

[beastie]

There has not yet been a non-beta release after this workaround was implemented. If you are willing, please download the above beta version and try it out, then let us know if this problem has indeed been fixed for you.

Leon
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[jmcp]

Ok, that worked with caveats, but resulted with what I want - a clean library!

The beta found the same 109 of 2600+ "orphans" that weren't really orphans. I let it add them back into my library, and rescanned. The results were the same orphans appear as duplicates... upon merging them from there, I ended up with exactly what I want - my library files are all cleaned up.

Ends up I had 3 gigs of duplicates scattered throughout my library, and now it's ready to move, THANK YOU!