An experience this week got me thinking about this thread again. After
adding some new CDs to my collection I noticed that SC 7.4 reported 4876
tracks in my library, but MusicIP reported 4891. After checking with
various OS tools (ls -l in Ubuntu, dir in DOS, Windows Explorer in XP,
etc.) I confirmed that I have 4891 FLAC and MP3 files, but somehow SC
wasn't "seeing" 15 of them. I turned up the debugging on the scanner to
"Warn" and re-scanned, but no clues in scanner.log. (In retrospect I
should have turned it up to Debug.)

I then compared the track listing in the MusicIP cache with the tracks
table in the SC database, which turned out to be pretty easy even
without knowing any SQL. I just exported them into something Excel can
read, sorted on /path/filename, put them side-by-side and created a flag
variable in another column to show where they didn't match. This
revealed the 15 files, which turned out to be owned by username (which
is normal) and be mode 600 (which is not normal). SC couldn't read the
files because SC runs under user squeezecenter, but MusicIP saw them
because it runs under my username. A simple user error, although I'm a
bit puzzled about exactly how it happened. Anyway I fixed the
permissions (644) and now all is good. 

Now, maybe some kind of double-checking
count-the-files-and-compare-to-the-metadata enhancement as suggested in
this thread would have caught this. But consider if I had made the
mistake one level higher, and made the *directory* unreadable by SC.
Then it would have no way of knowing there are audio files to be
scanned, and the double-checking wouldn't reveal the problem. So the
scanning process would be made more complex (at some cost to develop and
maintain), with only limited payback.

Which more or less takes me back to what I said in 'post #9 of this
thread'
(http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=316845#post316845): SC
shouldn't be expected to do one's basic file housekeeping. Moreover, in
some not-very-exceptional cases there is no way possible for it to do
that housekeeping, or even verify file totals.


-- 
aubuti
------------------------------------------------------------------------
aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49429

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