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Author Topic: Ongoing Library Issues  (Read 1534 times)

ssands

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Ongoing Library Issues
« on: August 01, 2019, 12:33:51 am »

These two issues have actually been going on for a few versions now.
Issue #1: I have a few custom library fields that I use for sorting my views. Specifically, I sort by album artist last-name, but want it displayed as First-name Last-name. (So, for example, Bill Laswell is listed under the "L"'s but appears as "Bill Laswell").
This works fine but occasionally the library seems to "forget" that field and I get some, not all, artists sorted by first name instead of last name. This just happened again and I can't think of any reason/incident that would have caused this (for instance a system or application crash.) So, I fill in the field again and it sorts fine...for awhile.
One question is: what happens if I set the sorting flag at the track level vs. the album level? Would something like that make a difference.
Issue #2: I like to use the smartlist occassionally that shows my audio imported over the last 30 days. It always shows me lots of albums that were imported years ago, in addition to some, but not all, of the recent imports.
Any ideas what might be happening?
I'm running MC 25.0.83 (64-bit) on Win 10 V1903 (OS Build 18362.267) (which is the latest stable release).
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Matt

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #1 on: August 01, 2019, 06:45:49 am »

Issue #2: I like to use the smartlist occassionally that shows my audio imported over the last 30 days. It always shows me lots of albums that were imported years ago, in addition to some, but not all, of the recent imports.
Any ideas what might be happening?

Would you paste the full smartlist search into the forum so we could take a look?

I might need a library backup (matt at jriver) if we can't reproduce.

Thanks.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

blgentry

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #2 on: August 01, 2019, 09:16:07 am »

One question is: what happens if I set the sorting flag at the track level vs. the album level? Would something like that make a difference.

All fields are set at the track level.  Fields exist at the track level.  There's not really a concept of an album level field.  Anything that applies to the album, like the [Album] field for example, needs to be set on all tracks in that album.  So your sort field should be set on all tracks of that album.  If it's not, it might explain the inconsistency you see.  Maybe, maybe not.  It's hard to say.  But I do know that all fields are associated with individual files (tracks).

Good luck,

Brian.
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ssands

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #3 on: August 01, 2019, 09:25:49 pm »

Would you paste the full smartlist search into the forum so we could take a look?

I might need a library backup (matt at jriver) if we can't reproduce.

Thanks.
Here's what I have for the search:

[Media Type]=[Audio] [Date Imported]=<30d ~sort=[Date Imported]-d

Happy to send the library if you think it's needed.
Thank You!
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ssands

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #4 on: August 01, 2019, 09:29:32 pm »

All fields are set at the track level.  Fields exist at the track level.  There's not really a concept of an album level field.  Anything that applies to the album, like the [Album] field for example, needs to be set on all tracks in that album.  So your sort field should be set on all tracks of that album.  If it's not, it might explain the inconsistency you see.  Maybe, maybe not.  It's hard to say.  But I do know that all fields are associated with individual files (tracks).

I did just do a spot check of a set of albums I had to reset yesterday. Even though I did the setting at the album level, every track does indicate to use the sorting I want. So, perhaps, setting an album, does carry over to all the tracks.
Thanks, I'll keep checking too.
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ssands

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #5 on: August 02, 2019, 01:08:37 am »

I checked the [Date Imported] field of the tracks of one of the albums that is showing up in the smartlist search and shouldn't be.
It shows a date of 7/16/2019, which is why it is showing up in the smartlist.
The issue is that it was imported 8-9 months ago.
So, it's not the smartlist, but for some reason, periodically, a chunk of my albums, a large chunk, get a new [Date Imported] field.
All my music is kept on a NAS, but I don't see why that would impact this.
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~OHM~

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #6 on: August 02, 2019, 07:20:43 am »

my guess would be anytime a update happens on the nas it's possibly changing the date of your files on the nas....just a thought....
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blgentry

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #7 on: August 02, 2019, 08:11:32 am »

I did just do a spot check of a set of albums I had to reset yesterday. Even though I did the setting at the album level, every track does indicate to use the sorting I want. So, perhaps, setting an album, does carry over to all the tracks.

You should explain your process for setting a field for an album.  I suspect that when you do this it's only selecting the first track of the album.  Describe your process, maybe with some screen shots, and we can probably help sort it out.

Brian.
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blgentry

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #8 on: August 02, 2019, 09:56:21 am »

It shows a date of 7/16/2019, which is why it is showing up in the smartlist.
The issue is that it was imported 8-9 months ago.
So, it's not the smartlist, but for some reason, periodically, a chunk of my albums, a large chunk, get a new [Date Imported] field.
All my music is kept on a NAS, but I don't see why that would impact this.

This is a somewhat well known problem.  What can happen is this:

1.  You import stuff from your NAS.
2.  Time passes.  Your NAS goes to sleep.
3.  MC opens and find the NAS asleep.  After some timeouts occur on reading some files, MC deletes them from your library.  You probably don't see this happen because...
4.  The NAS wakes up.  MC sees a file system event or the two timer expires. 
5.  Now MC sees the files that it just deleted.  But they are "new" because they weren't there during stage 3 above.
6.  All these files (which might only be some of them, not the whole drive) are re-imported and their import date is updated to right now.

To "fix" this, I like to set two options to prevent it:

A.  Tools > Options > Library & Folders > configure auto import > Tasks > Fix Broken links.  Set this to NO to be the most safe.  Set to "yes (protect files on missing drives)" to be nearly as safe.
B.  Tools > Options > Library & Folders > configure auto import > Tasks > Update for external changes > (unchecked) .  This one is related, but not strictly necessary.  It tells MC to NOT re-read tags if they are changed by other applications outside of MC.

Brian.
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ssands

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Re: Ongoing Library Issues
« Reply #9 on: October 24, 2019, 02:12:33 pm »

Thank you, Brian,
I'll try this out.
(Had to go offline for awhile to deal with some family issues and am now getting back to these things).
Much appreciated.
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