Endless searching

[Bill Carlisle]

Andy,

It seems to me that Firefly scans flawlessly and quickly but just doesn’t know how to go to the next step after finishing the scan. Maybe that has something to do with OS 10.4.7.

Recently I brought my wireless Mac laptop home from work for the first time in several months but could not hook to my wireless network. After a long session with AT&T tech support, I was told you have to put a “$” in front of the 10-digit WEP in my laptop setup. When I did this, sure enough it worked. Something about 10.4.

I wish I were more more technally proficient in this stuff so that I could help, since I sense your frustration. But I know you will find the answer, and I will be there eagerly waiting to reap the benefits of your hard labor.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

😆 you overestimate my abilities! I have figured out a lot of stuff through trial and error rather than through any great technical knowhow, though I have had good guidance as well of course from greater mortals than myself…

I must confess I’m at a loss. Like I said earlier, that latest nightlie (sorry to bang on about it) *should* have fixed that hanging issue. It was a bug in the earlier svn’s and it caught me out as well. I suppose what you could do is go down a step to svn1372 and see if that works. You never know…

My other suggestions would be to do some simple first aid – repair your disc permissions (Finder>Go>Utilities>Disc Utility) reboot, reinstall & see if that has an effect. The most comprehensive option – and I do it from time to time anyway – is to run software such as disc warrior or similar if you have it. It will sort out any (well, just about any) crankiness your mac has and again, perhaps that might resolve the issue.

Other than that, if you can downgrade to itunes 6 then that would of course be your solution til roku come out with the fix for itunes 7. You can get it here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/itunes605.html

Not having done this I’m thinking off the top of my head here, but you would want to trash itunes 7, plus the itunes .plist files in /you/Library/Preferences – I see 3 .plist files in my setup. Of course you would want to put them aside rather than delete them from the trash just in case it all goes t*ts up and you need to restore them. Then install itunes 6.0.5 and hopefully you’d be set again. The only thing I can potentially see a problem with this is having to re-add your music to itunes again… and playlists disappearing.

Not having done this myself I am adding a large disclaimer – don’t blame me if it goes wrong…! On that basis you may not want to try this, but maybe I’ll give it a whirl this afternoon myself and see what happens… gotta go walk the dog now!

Andy

[Anonymous]

Bill,

DO NOT FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS! I checked out various things and feeling bullish, thought I would be able to donwgrade from 7 back to 6.0.5

so far, I can’t… 👿 so I’d suggest you leave well alone. There will be a way – windows users are managing it, it’s just a question of working it out.

err… anyone know how!? 🙄

[Anonymous]

ok,

do what’s described here:

http://macosx.com/tech-support/is-there-a-way-to-actually-uninstall-itunes-from-mac-os-x-tiger/9744.html

this refers to an earlier version of itunes but it’s good. Also delete the package receipt for itunes in hard drive/Library/Receipts

then:

install the 6.0.5 version. When you launch it, you’ll get an error message saying a newer version of itunes created the library (or some such) and you won’t be able to run v.6

quit itunes. go into your music folder and you should see a sub folder called previous libraries. There should be a previous itunes library file which you should be able to use to overwrite the one in the parent directory. Just drag it out of the sub folder and tell it to replace the existing version.

relaunch itunes and you should be back in business with a working version of 6.0.5

For myself I did this a slightly different way in that I took a backup version made last month. (In trying to figure all this out I think I deleted a file I shouldn’t have, so had to resort to the backup version. Ho hum 😳 ) So I’ve lost a few things that I’ll have to re-add but essentially it’s got v6 back up.

Obviously it would make sense to make a copy of the itunes library and .xml file and stick them in a safe place before doing the overwrite.

If this works for other mac users could they indicate as such, as it would be useful over on the roku firefly forum for users who can’t get firefly to work…

[shongzah]

Well, for me at least.

I was in the process of dumping iTunes 7 and exploring the folder system created by iTunes 7. One of the items in that folder was an alias that pointed back to the music folder. Something like this:
music->iTunes->music(alias)->iTunes->music(alias)->etc->etc->etc…
I ran firefly last night just to see what it would do with a large chuck of time. This morning the log said that it had started and was serving 500000 songs and that it took 8000 seconds to complete the scan. After dumping the alias I re-installed firefly (just in case) and re-scanned. This time the log said 2500 songs scanned in 60 seconds.

[rpedde]

@shongzah wrote:

This morning the log said that it had started and was serving 500000 songs and that it took 8000 seconds to complete the scan. After dumping the alias I re-installed firefly (just in case) and re-scanned. This time the log said 2500 songs scanned in 60 seconds.

That’s a lot of songs. D’oh!

Guess symlink detection might not be a bad idea.

[mgall23]

Hi,

I am having a similar problem when trying to use firefly on my PC. The main difference is that while firefly begins scan, it never registers any music files. My music is on an external maxtor 250GB Drive and I have over 130GB of music. After scanning for 5-10 mins the drive stops reading, but still no music files register in the firefly log. What’s worse is that when I look at my sys monitor, firefly.exe starts hogging 99% of my CPU and eats between 20,000 and 300,000 k of memory. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling several times both Bonjour and firefly with no change. Also I cannot open the web admin interface, my browser states: Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at localhost:9999. I do not have an active firewall and I have even tried clearing a port on my Linksys WRTP54G router. My log is below Please let me know what if any other information is needed to find source of this problem.

Thanks,
MG

Log file: firefly.log

2007-01-09 00:12:53 (24dc1c74): Firefly Version svn-1463: Starting with debuglevel 2
2007-01-09 00:12:53 (24dc1c74): Starting rendezvous daemon
2007-01-09 00:12:53 (24dc1c74): Building drive mapping table from C:Program FilesFirefly Media Servermapping.ini
2007-01-09 00:12:53 (24dc1c74): Initializing database
2007-01-09 00:12:53 (24dc1c74): Full reload…
2007-01-09 00:12:54 (24dc1c74): Starting mp3 scan

[rpedde]

@mgall23 wrote:

My log is below Please let me know what if any other information is needed to find source of this problem.

I’ve seen mp3 files that choke libid3tag before. It might be one of those. Try turning off the service (control panel -> administrative tools -> services -> firefly media server) and then running it in debug mode, using the link in program files -> firefly media server.

It will likely start scanning through all the files and then just hanging on one particular file. Stop the server, move the file out of the way and try again.

If you find a particular file that makes it hang, I’d be interested to see it.

— Ron

[mgall23]

Hi Ron,

I went ahead and ran firefly in the debug mode and sure enough there were three music file that caused the scan to hang. In all three instances I believe the reason the search stopped was due to foreign characters within the ID3 Tag which were unreadable (all 3 instances were from albums imported from Japan. Once I cleaned up the tags (i.e. deleted the comment section within the file properties), and restarted the debug scan (ending and restarting) I was able to plow through all the files. Once this was completed, I restarted firefly via normal start up, and I was immediately able to utilize the web admin interface as well as my Soundbridge was able to recognize the server. A big thank you, to you Ron for saving me from much mental anguish!!! Sorry I tried to find some way to copy the entry from the debug scan but was unable to do so, anyway, if it is any help, the unrecognized character sets pooped up in the file string and looked like a horizontal T.

Cheers!
MG

[rpedde]

@mgall23 wrote:

Sorry I tried to find some way to copy the entry from the debug scan but was unable to do so, anyway, if it is any help, the unrecognized character sets pooped up in the file string and looked like a horizontal T.

Do you still have a copy of the bad file?

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