Matthew Howell's dashboard

Glad that I finally figured that out, then. Just wish I never had to. – Matthew Howell, on June 23, 2009 00:44

So is the thing I reported some kind of scan, to make sure nothing needs to get copied or renamed? Okay, I misunderstood; the thing I thought was a bug was by design. But there is still a problem; this scanning process (assuming that's what this is) should either have to be started manually by the user or somehow be done in the background so as to avoid essentially increasing the startup time of the program tenfold. I mean, it seems like kind of a hack to me; it shouldn't be necessary to check the library unless something is wrong with it.

Nearly (but for some reason not always) every time I start Songbird on my 64-bit Vista system, it attempts to reorganize all or most of my library, including tracks it has organized before. The only clue I have as to why is that, if I cancel the operation and then open the management options and click on Preview, I see that all of the "from" paths are written in all lower case and the "to" paths are properly capitalized, when in fact all or very nearly all directories and files in my library are already properly capitalized to begin with (because Songbird has already renamed everything before). Now, this problem doesn't seem to affect the functionality of Songbird, it really just makes it take longer to start, but it's still annoying. I'll be happy to provide any other information that might be helpful.


Edit: I should clarify something here. I created the library in question from a library folder that already existed and was already properly organized (that is, by artist and then by album). I simply told Songbird to use this path as its managed library and then added the entire folder using the import media command in the file menu.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Inordinate number of management actions given an already mostly organized directory.

Then I was probably wrong about that part; I don't use system restore very often. – Matthew Howell, on June 21, 2009 13:26

Yes, this is the default behavior, but it can be changed. The idea is that files added to the library are collected in one central location and then the original files can be deleted; good for adding individual songs or albums, not so much for whole libraries. If you don't want this, you can set the library folder in the management settings to wherever your library currently is and nothing will get copied (however, this may be what leads to the issue I described in http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t... ). – Matthew Howell, on June 21, 2009 04:50

I'm getting this message pretty frequently myself; it seems as if it may be occurring when the actual error is the "cannot write metadata" issue (that is, this message usually seems to appear when I'm trying to write metadata to an m4a file), which would mean there are actually two problems (both the lack of m4a tag editing support, and the wrong error being displayed). I'm on Vista 64-bit by the way, and yes, I have checked all the file permissions.

You can use the Playlist Export Tool extension, assuming it works stably. – Matthew Howell, on June 21, 2009 03:28

If you had your files sorted by genre and then artist (or anything similar), then the management system can rebuild that for you if you tell it to do so; go to the "Manage Music" pane in the options window and set the drop-down boxes accordingly. This assumes of course that your files are tagged with the proper genres and artists and whatever else. If you had done something a bit more custom, then I'm sorry, but you'll have to shut off management (in the same options pane) and fix things manually; I don't think system restore would do it. And you have every right to be angry; Songbird's documentation is awful in general, and specifically users really (really, REALLY) should be warned if this feature is going to be on by default on new installations (which it really shouldn't be to begin with).