Audacious - OLD, PLEASE USE GITHUB DISCUSSIONS/ISSUES

Steve Emerson wrote:

Running Audacious on my new Raspberry Pi (with Raspbian, release this month, Jan. 2021).

To be clearer, the OS is Debian Buster with Raspberry Pi Desktop; Release date: January 11th 2021; Kernel version: 4.19

Further data: running Audacious on a Windows 7 laptop, everything noted above happened again. That includes moving all the content of a problem folder into a second, newly created folder, and then opening this new folder without episode. The one variable was that the app never crashed (froze up), meaning that once the error message was dismissed, I could scroll past the first list of tracks down to the redundant, second list (without numbers) and play the tracks from there. Photo attached; end of first list, followed by start of second list.

If I'm understanding correctly, it is only with "Add Folder" that the problem occurs, and not when dragging the files themselves to the playlist?

And also, you said that after copying files from a "problem" folder to a new folder, you were able to open them fine?

This makes it sound like Audacious is having trouble enumerating the files in the folder. Which could be caused by a filesystem or permissions issue.

Just a simple thing to check if you haven't already: does the user running Audacious own, or at least have execute permission on, the problem folders?

Hold on -- looking very closely at your screenshots, you have hidden files (filenames starting with a period) in those folders. Those are the ones Audacious is having trouble with when you "Add Folder".

Your other players are probably skipping over those files. And if you drag-and-drop files, or copy them to a new folder, you're probably skipping the hidden files as well.

I think that explains everything except why those hidden files are there to begin with. Some weird Mac thing, perhaps?

Audacious still shouldn't be crashing on hidden files though, regardless. If you can repeat a crash reliably (with the most recent version of Audacious!) then please try to identify a single problem file, and share that with us. If you can capture a stack trace of the crash, that would be very helpful too.

John Lindgren wrote:

If I'm understanding correctly, it is only with "Add Folder" that the problem occurs, and not when dragging the files themselves to the playlist?

And also, you said that after copying files from a "problem" folder to a new folder, you were able to open them fine?

This makes it sound like Audacious is having trouble enumerating the files in the folder. Which could be caused by a filesystem or permissions issue.

Just a simple thing to check if you haven't already: does the user running Audacious own, or at least have execute permission on, the problem folders?

Thanks for the reply, John! Paragraph 1: yes, and yes. Paragaph 2: yes (after copying to a new folder, no problems).

Re: your second post, as far as I can tell those file-names starting with periods were generated by Audacious -- I say that because I don't see them that way anywhere else. They do start with numbers (but so do lots of files in folders that play fine). See attached screen photo, showing the files evident in Audacious via my previous screen shot -- in the Pi File Manager (no periods at beginnings), and also what should be the Permissions status on the Pi. (Also, bear in mind, the problem repeated itself on my Windows 7 machine, where I believe Permissions aren't usually an issue.)

Think I would have to share an entire folder, as individual tracks, qua tracks, will play OK.

Most recent version? On the Pi, my version shows "Last modification 02/20/2019," sorry can't do better, new to this OS. It's the version available in the registry. My Windows machine is running version of July 10, 2020, should be 4.0.5 . --Glad to be making headway with this!

The files starting with a period are not created by Audacious. You don't see them that way anywhere else because they are /hidden/ files.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/88875/why-are-filenames-that-start-with-a-dot-hidden-can-i-hide-files-without-using-a

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=220100

Further -- sorry to be slow about the matter of hidden files. With my Windows machine, I was able to easily reveal that exactly the hidden files you were seeing were present in the problem folders; just generally hidden (duh). As you say, their creation must be a Mac thing. Or possibly it was done by a media player I've often accessed them with. (Some folders that play OK also seem to have hidden files, incidentally.)

So now I can solve; with a lot of editing of these folders. Um, you don't expect ever to encourage Audacious to "skip over" such files the way the other players do -- ?

Thank you.

Think I would have to share an entire folder, as individual tracks, qua tracks, will play OK.

Those are presumably the non hidden files that play OK.

Most recent version? On the Pi, my version shows "Last modification 02/20/2019," sorry can't do better, new to this OS.

In Audacious: File menu, About. It will tell you the version. Latest is 4.0.5.

We can possibly make a future version skip hidden files. I don't think it's a question that has come up before.

Thanks again for all the help, John. The hidden files seemingly get generated when Mac files are copied onto a drive with a file system not peculiar to Mac; in this case FAT32 on flash drives. Evidently this comes up a lot. Metadata that resides in any given Mac file can't be accessed in those file systems so it's split off into additional files (hidden ones that begin with dot/underscore); something like that. So this is manageable. Finding my music files on the Mac drives where they originated will facilitate.

Audacious 3.10.1 is what I have on my Raspberry Pi and is what's in the repository -- confirming your team's note about outdatedness in such repositories. I could attempt to install the Ubuntu-oriented version from that PPA, but at this point it doesn't seem necessary (nor promising?). I have 4.0.5 on my Windows machine.