Arch Linux

Nahuel

Member

Registered: 2009-07-05

Posts: 10

MPD skips files in database

Good day everyone.

My problem is simple, but odd (since I've been using MPD for ages and this never happened before).
After having hardware issues, I re-installed Arch and set it up as usual. But today I noticed that some of my music is missing from the MPD library. At first I thought this was a locale issue (since it seemed like the files that were missing had non-english characters) so I added this to the mpd.conf:

id3v1_encoding            "ISO-8859-1"

But with no success, since there were files with non-english characters being listed just fine.

What I found really weird after re-installing MPD is that the database updated in seconds! (almost with no HD activity...) and it looked fine at first sight. Now when I do "mpc update" it says it's updating but I don't see any hd activity. I can only see it working hard when I do "mpd --create-db".

I know it is updating since I can see the new files I add. The files that are missing seem quite random...

What could it be? Here's my mpd.conf:

music_directory        "/media/datos/Musica"
playlist_directory    "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
db_file            "/var/lib/mpd/mpd.db"
log_file        "/var/log/mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file        "/var/run/mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file        "/var/lib/mpd/mpdstate"
user            "mpd"
bind_to_address        "any"
mixer_type        "software"
id3v1_encoding            "ISO-8859-1"

The only odd thing in my setup is that the music is in a NTFS partition that is mounted at startup. I didn't think it was a permission issue since it's quite random and all users on this pc can read/write that partition just fine.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: MPD skips files in database

This may not help, but it's worth a shot.

I've used MPD with a mostly FFmpeg backend for a while. I found that certain changes in field names of tags would prevent MPD from adding songs to the database. If this is related to your issue, a simple way to check is to compare tags of files that work and those that don't with tools like mediainfo or ffprobe (if it's included in the Arch package of FFmpeg).

Nahuel

Member

Registered: 2009-07-05

Posts: 10

Re: MPD skips files in database

Well, that did help. I installed mediainfo, checked a file that works and it gave an output. When I tried one that doesn't work, the output was blank. The weird thing is that thunar's audio plugin (don't know which one it is) does recognize the file's tags and so do all my other audio players.
I used EasyTag to delete the files' tags and re-wrote them, with no success.

Well, I guess we can say that it's actually a problem with the files, so, unless someone has ideas on how to fix them, we can mark this topic as "kinda solved"

frodoontop

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2004-05-18

Posts: 37

Website

Re: MPD skips files in database

Was having the same issue. Fixed it by setting the permissions right. I got the idea by looking at /var/log/mpd/mpd.conf. So simply run a chmod 775 -R on your music directory.