ML_SONY Discussion/Bugs/Requests Continued

[ltmayonnaise]

After going through all the threads here, specifically the original ML_SONY thread (http://www.atraclife.com/forums/index.php?showforum=24) I've noticed that all the discussion has turned to SWEX. I really like SWEX, but would like to have a place to continue the discussion about ML_SONY as well. Hence this thread...

Just thought I'd start off by mentioning that ML_SONY 1.0.3 rules! It works great, but after putting it through it's paces on a month long trip, uploading and downloading music from friends several times I ended up with a bit of a disaster on my NW-A1000 player.

Bug Report:

Winamp crashed several times during different transfer operations. Eventually I ended up with a database on my player that had seriously mistagged music. Songs in the wrong album, gibberish in the genre field, misnamed tracks, etc. The music still played, but it was a mess to sort it all out when I got back home.

Possible Cause:

I can trace it back to one thing in particular. Illegal characters in Windows (eg. * or ?). If the tracks have illegal characters in their ID3 tags, when uploaded or downloaded they cause Winamp/ML_Sony to crash. This crashing happened so many times that I'm pretty sure it's what corrupted my database.

Ideas:

My suggestion would be to run a regular expression against each tracks ID3 tag before a transfer is made and replace or eliminate any illegal characters. I have a feeling this would eliminate a huge number of crashes, at least the type I've been encountering. I also had a lot of problems w/ ID3 tags for music with foreign characters, Spanish characters in this case. Unicode support could help here I'm guessing. Just a few thoughts.

Is anyone else experiencing this type of crash?

Thanks again to the developers working on ML_SONY! You're making my player actually worth owning

Ciao,

ltmayonnaise

Edited September 20, 2006 by ltmayonnaise

[apache]

I hope there would be a plugin version for FOOBAR 2000 , foobar is much far better than winamp IMO

thanks

[ltmayonnaise]

Hey otiasj, just curious if ML_SONY was still under development?

The alpha version that's out now is so close to being perfect, it just needs a few touch ups and bug fixes and it would be a reliable 100% replacement for sonic stage. The unicod/bad character issue I mentioned before can make it a deal breaker since a lot of music won't load onto the player, and if it does, you can't get it back off. SWEX is able to transfer those very songs that screw up ML_SONY, it just does some character replacement during import/export.

Regardless if the project is being developed or not, thanks a ton for working on it! It's come in handy many a time!

Ciao,

ltmayonnaise

[nobitsu]

It crashes when I drag and drop now. =(

I also aggree with appache about foobar2000 being really good.

Edited January 1, 2007 by nobitsu

[otiasj]

Hello Everyone,

Yes this is still under development,

At this point I am creating a seperate c++ library that coders will be able to use to create their own plugins easily.

Good point about the bad characters. If you guys have the time to send me a track tag that is causing problem it would save me a lot of time!

Regards!

[markd]

hi

Using curent download of ml sony in winamp 5.23. If you over fill your hard drive ( ie try and transfer 2gb when only 1 out of 20gb is available on a3000) the database gets corrupted and winamp crashes. Repeated this to duplicate problem. The A3000 then trys to build a database and it either has to repair it or recovers it with only a few songs. Winamp can read a few but most of the tracks on the hardrive have gone.

Is there a way to stop it trying to write more to the harddrive than space available?

[otiasj]

No at this point there is no space dedicated to the database,

I need to add this.

Sonicstage seems to keep an empty file of 50mb at all time on the device to make sure there is enough space

to write the database and delete it when it need space for the db

I will probably do the same

[yaroukh]

I have a playlist on my player which contains (amongst others) following track:

ARTIST: James Holden & Julie Thompson

TITLE: Come To Me

COMMENT: Club Mix

BITRATE: 320

Then I heve created another playlist in WinAmp which contains 3 tracks, and one of them is this one:

ARTIST: James Holden & Julie Thompson

TITLE: Come To Me

COMMENT: Holden's Amateur Guitar Mix

BITRATE: VBR

... as you can see it differs from the previously mentioned track in the COMMENT and BITRATE field, the rest is identical.

When transferring the later playlist (containing 3 tracks) into my player only 2 tracks are listed in the message-box and then transfered; the later track was ignored and in the resulting playlist on my player it has been replaced by the earlier version. I tend to believe it is not because of the VBR (as another track in the later playlist with VBR has been transfered without a problem), rather because of the identical ARTIST and TITLE fields.

Am I right? (And if so, has the issue been reported already?)

And how about http://code.google.com/ for ml_sony issue tracking?

Edited June 3, 2007 by yaroukh

[otiasj]

You are right,

To check if a track is already on the player I am basing myself on :

the title, the artist, the album and the track number.

Those are the info that are easily available on the player. Maybe I will change that in the sonydb if I think of an easy way to do it.

About google code, (and ml_sony website? )

I need more time to set all that :-(

I am still working on creating the library tester.

Anyway thank you for reporting this :-)

it is helpfull!

see ya

[yaroukh]

Is it easy for you to locate the original mp3-tag within the OMA-file? I thought of some custom field (e.g. "MLSONYID") within an id3v2-tag that you could use for storing some hash of the original filename/location. (The mp3-tag of an original file could even remain unchanged.)

If it is not a problem but it is CPU/time-expensive operation the pugin could do the check only when title+artist+album+trackno do match.

Edited June 4, 2007 by yaroukh

[otiasj]

Browsing the tag is not a problem,

Although If I have to go though all the files to check every tag it will be very time consuming,

also There is a couple of byte I think sonicstage is using to store his own db info,

I might use them, but it will probably provoke severe crashes if you try using sonicstage...

So finally I just created my own format to save my database info,

it should be ok in the next release

[zzzz]

Bug Report:

Winamp crashed several times during different transfer operations. Eventually I ended up with a database on my player that had seriously mistagged music. Songs in the wrong album, gibberish in the genre field, misnamed tracks, etc. The music still played, but it was a mess to sort it all out when I got back home.

Possible Cause:

I can trace it back to one thing in particular. Illegal characters in Windows (eg. * or ?). If the tracks have illegal characters in their ID3 tags, when uploaded or downloaded they cause Winamp/ML_Sony to crash. This crashing happened so many times that I'm pretty sure it's what corrupted my database.

Ideas:

My suggestion would be to run a regular expression against each tracks ID3 tag before a transfer is made and replace or eliminate any illegal characters.

How do you "run a regular expression against each tracks ID3 tag"?

[morj]

i got absolutely the same problem as in the first message. and i also was guessing this happened due to some characters in file's or id3tag's names. so the only way is now swex.. though i liked ml_sony. =)

strange notice.. i uploaded some tracks with ml_sony, let's call it group A. then it crashed a few times, so i continued with swex. (all songs i've uploaded with ml_sony REMAINED, they didn't disappear!!) ok,with swex i uploaded some other tracks, group B. but for some reasons swex wouldn't upload bob marley songs. so i used ml_sony to upload it, and it was just perfect. but then i disconnected walkman... and so all i got was songs group A and bob marley. group B did not exist at all.

Edited July 5, 2007 by morj

[otiasj]

Hello morj,

The database is probably corrupted,

the songs are there, it's just the db.

I suggest you try libtester v2 to try to recreate the DB

more details here : db corruption

please let me know if it worked!

thx

[yaroukh]

Is there a place where one could check the progress of things related to ml_sony development...?

(ML_SONY on SourceForge seems to be dead, and this forum is far from healthy life as well.

[CrowJake]

I have a bug where my database just stops at "S", when I browse across the initials of my artists. Anything beginging with T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, just ends up being lumped under "S".

Are there any easy ways of repairing my database?

[astatine]

I don't mind making a website for it if you think ml_sony ought to have one. Sourceforge could host it.

[bbr]

Hi,

I've had my NWA1000 for at least 2 years now and all this time I've been using SS. I'm a religious Winamp user, and i just found out about this plugin about 6 hours ago. Now here's my issue (and based on the health of this forums atm i don't expect it will be adressed soon, but here goes): I consider myself an advanced computer user...don't get me wrong, I'm not boasting, I go to school for CS...however I can't get my head around this whole thing. I've been following every single step properly, read over the faq a good 30 times now and I still can't get this working despite everyone's good feedback.

I'm running Winamp 5.35 (1.04 supports this according to faq) on Vista Ultimate. Plugin seems to work fine...file transfers complete etc, no errors in Winamp. However the player says no database is found when I unplug and try and listen. Now I've noticed that after I add songs using Winamp they simply show up as mp3 files under, for instance, H:\Opeth\Ghost Reveries\Ghost of Perdition. This doesn't seem right. Also the songs that I had added previously with SS are seen by the player and play fine. Thus after using winamp to put some music on my player, the existing database does not get overwritten as the faq suggests. To put it in perspective, when I add files using winamp it acts as a portable hard drive with no playing capabilities, as if i had copy/pasted songs using win explorer. I've tried other combinations as well ie no previous music added with SS or adding one or more files etc. Hopefully someone still takes a look at this thread, i would love to make use of what seems like a gorgeous plugin

PS i was planning on keeping this post as formal as i could but by the end of it i fucked up....people DO need sleep

Regards.

[CrowJake]

yo bbr!

I have that problem if i don't have my walkman plugged into the computer when i start up win amp, try closing winamp and then starting it up while the player is plugged in and that might allow you to use it. when you do that, it appears under "Portables" rather than "Devices" - or the other way round, I don't recall.

[bbr]

tried it both ways....same problem...thanks for the input though...

if anyone has any other suggestions id love to try them out!

[wytefyre]

Edit --

Nevermind. I think I found the solution elsewhere. Sorry!

Edited February 24, 2008 by wytefyre

[wytefyre]

Nevermind. Jumped the gun again.

So, I have an NW-S718F player that won't work right with anything I've tried. I'm still messing with versions of SonicStage and praying to various dieties to get it to transfer correctly, but for the time being, I get about a 50/50 chance of a file working. So far, the only thing that HAS worked has been ml_sony. I'm not sure what it is that makes certain files not work and others work, though. Is there anything I can do that could help me figure this out?

Also, any plans for Unicode support in the future? Just wondering...

Thanks for any and all help!