Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[couchjr]

Wise ones,

I've just upgraded my laptop (MacBook Pro) from MC 19.x to MC 20.0.124. I use the laptop copy of MC almost exclusively for tagging and editing tags for .dsf files. My working storage for this process is an NTFS-formatted 3 or 4 TB USB3 Porsche hard drive. I use Paragon's NTFS drivers, and I'm at the current version of Mavericks on this MBP. I've had absolutely no problem adding, editing, saving, removing, or otherwise manipulating tags for the last year with this setup under MC 19.x. But it's been a long time since I've installed MC, so I may be rusty on configuring things, or something may have changed.

The new version imports tagged files correctly, displays existing tag information including custom tag fields previously populated. I went into the new MC version and manually recreated all the custom tag fields (feature request: have MC save these on upgrade, like browsers do with bookmarks), made sure the "save tags to files where possible" box was checked for all of them, and disabled auto-update. I have manually recreated the smartlist for "Removed Database" so I can verify manually that any deleted files can be re-imported.

If I add a value to an empty tag field for a track, the library seems to accept it. But when I click "Update tags from library" either for a single track, an album, or all albums in the library, I instantly get the error message that there was a problem and to check whether the files are not present, are read-only, or in use by another application.

I have trashed all prior versions of MC, emptied the trash, and turned off all other running apps. I checked "Get Info" and it says I still have write permissions for all the files and folders on the HD. I ran Disk Utility on the HD and it shows the disk to be healthy.

I'm quite willing to believe there's some obvious setting I've forgotten to set, but for the life of me I can't think what. Any help troubleshooting this will be most appreciated--this has stopped me cold on the last batch of tidying up the tags for several thousand files before copying to my NAS--frustrating would be a gross understatement.

Many thanks in advance for any insight!

[blgentry]

Let's eliminate the obvious first.   Check the file path in JRiver of one of the files in question to make sure it is where you think it is.  Play it to make sure.

Then, go to that file and use an external app to write a tag to it.  If that works, you can be sure that the file system isn't an issue.  I only bring this up because NTFS is read only without your special driver and I want to verify that your driver is working.  Like I said, eliminate the obvious. 

Brian.

[couchjr]

Thanks, Brian. I should have said I did try playing some files, and the dancing bars in the header area danced away. I think sound was emitted through the built-in laptop speakers, but my window AC was drowning it out, so I'll retest to confirm.

How would I write a tag to the file using an external app? I can write a tag to an MPL file using a text editor, but to transfer that to the media file I'd still need JRiver to import the folder using the MPL and JRiver's library tools to "Update tags from library" command, right?

Can I open a .dsf file with a text editor like BBEdit? If so, where would I look for the tag info?

Thanks!

[blgentry]

I had hoped that you had another tagging program that worked with DSF.  If these were MP3 or FLAC it would be easier...

Maybe it's enough to just copy and delete a file or two... that way you know you have read/write access.  If you want to go the whole route, there's a freeware tag editor called KID3 that's supposed to work with almost everything, including DSF.  I have not verified DSF support, but it says it works.  Here it is:

http://kid3.sourceforge.net/

I have a funny feeling this problem is beyond the file system, but it's nice to get that out of the way first.

Brian.

[couchjr]

Thanks. I'll try copying and deleting a file. As you say that should confirm privileges. I'll also look to see if there's a Paragon driver panel where I can check settings and check for updates. It occurs to me that there may have been an incremental OS update since I last worked on tags with MC19.x so it's possible it broke the Paragon drivers and they need updating. Remote, but as you say, worth checking.

[couchjr]

OK, test results:

I mounted the HD, opened an album folder in Finder, and duplicated one track file successfully. Next, I launched MC 20.0.124 and did an import-single-folder (with all media types checked for import) of that same album. It showed up in the library, including the duplicate track. I tried playing a track and it definitely played through the laptop speakers.

So I tried typing a value in a blank tag field for the first track, and it "took" in the library. So then I tried the update-tags-from-library command and got the error message instantly. I also tried selecting the album icon in album view and executing the same command, as well as selecting all individual tracks in detail view and executing it, and got the error message instantly in all cases (with the appropriate number of tracks reported in each case). So I deleted the album, and then opened the "Removed Database" playlist and manually removed all the tracks so they could be re-imported. I tried re-importing. The first time I did so, I thought the new test tag value had come over, but when I repeated the process, it didn't, so I must have failed to quit MC the first time prior to re-importing.

I repeated the same import, test tag, try to update tags from library, delete, clear Removed Database, quit MC series of steps several times and got the same error message and the test tag would not re-import.

I also successfully deleted the duplicate file track on the HD via the Finder.

I checked my version of the Paragon drivers and they are up to date and rated for both Mavericks and Yosemite, though I had done one incremental OS update since my last tag editing session using MC 19.x (I'm on OS 10.9.5). But I think the above test shows I can successfully write to the drive. I haven't ever had to adjust antivirus or firewall settings in the past to do this, and I haven't changed anything there since the MC upgrade.

So I think we've eliminated a read/write issue to the HD file system.

I don't think I've added any applications to this laptop since my last tag editing session with MC 19.x. Splashtop Streamer runs in the background, but I haven't been connecting remotely to this machine, and that also was present under MC 19.x.

So we're back either to some MC setting I have forgotten or set wrongly, or unexpected behavior in the app, or mystery factor X.

Thanks for any light you can shed. Has anyone else reported similar problems? If not, I'm inclined to think I have some setting wrong . . . .

[couchjr]

Update: After searching through old topics on the forum, I tried a suggestion from Matt of copying an album folder from the HD to my laptop (known good permissions). I then tried importing from that source into MC, editing a tag, and running "update tags from library." Worked fine; no error.

So after clearing the library and relaunching MC, I imported the same folder directly from the HD and tried the same tasks--no luck; instant error when executing the update tags command.

So I think, after all, that the permissions have been messed up on the HD. Paragon uses the Mac's Disk Utility for repairs but the "Verify Permissions" and "Repair Permissions" functions are not available for NTFS. So I'll take the HD in to work and have one of the support people run the Windows disk utility on it to repair permissions--hopefully that will solve the problem . . . . Thanks to Brian for his contributions. I won't post again unless that doesn't solve the problem.

[JimH]

Mysterious problems are often antivirus problems.

Or file permissions.

[couchjr]

Well, using Windows diskchk on the HD did not seem to fix the problem, so I had to copy the remaining folders (~400GB) to my laptop, edit the tags there, and copy back to the HD for transfer to the NAS. Added several hours to the process.

From now on, I'll probably just load the files to the NAS first, and do any tag editing there. Thanks all.