Shared files invisible to other users

Submitted by scrambly on Sun, 09/04/2011 - 05:06
Forums: 
Soulseek General Discussion

Nir,

I am on Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). I was so excited to recently find out about SoulseekQt. As you're well aware, I'm sure, a Mac client for Soulseek that's even remotely usable doesn't exist, and running through Parallels uses too many resources.

I'm glad to see what you're doing here and will try to be a good tester by reporting major bugs, only, and not feature requests. :) I'm sure basic functionality and performance has your plate full enough.

Here's a big problem I've encountered ...

I have shared all of my music folders, yet other users are reporting they can't see my music files. They see the folders, subfolders and supplementary files inside (e.g. artwork or leftover desktop.ini files from Windows), but no music. From my windows computer I added myself as a friend (I'm using 2 accounts) and it shows my files = 0.

The diagnostics tab in SoulseekQt shows that all folders have been scanned. For example...
[Sun Sep 4 06:59:39 2011] Adding folder /Users/blaine/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Daniel Wesley as part of sharing /Users/blaine/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media
[Sun Sep 4 06:59:39 2011] Adding folder /Users/blaine/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Daniel Wesley/Sing & Dance as part of sharing /Users/blaine/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media

To test whether the scan was considering music files I added a single MP3 to my shared folder, did a Rescan (0 files removed, but it didn't list the 1 file added), deleted that file from my hard drive, did a Rescan and it showed 1 files removed. So that aspect seems to detect music files specifically.

This is crippling for me, because without sharing I risk being banned by others, and I want to share because that's what Soulseek is all about!

My user name is kenoshi if you want to see my shares. I will try to remain online as much as possible. You may post messages here in reply, and I will check back.

Thank you!

Submitted by Nir on Sun, 09/04/2011 - 08:01.

Hi Kenoshi, I tried messaging you but I guess you weren't looking at the client at the time (there is no notification mechanism external to the client window as of yet). This is a weird one, I'm not quite sure how to approach it. I tried browsing your share, and I can see that while most of your folders appear almost empty, if you type .mp3 in the filter box for your share you can see that in fact a lot of your folders do contain mp3s. So the question is why some and not others... there's nothing I can see in the code that would cause something like this.

There are three things I can think to suggest for you to try that may or may not help us figure this out:

  • When the client is not running, you can rename .Soulseek (hidden file in your home folder) to something else like .Soulseek.bak. When you start the client you'll have to reconfigure everything from scratch, but it should be interesting to see if the problem will repeat itself when you reshare the problem folder.
  • Get a directory listing of your iTunes Media folder by going to where it is in a command prompt and typing something like:

    ls -lR "iTunes Media" > ls.txt

    Then upload the contents of ls.txt to a service like Gist so I can look at the filenames/permissions. There might be some commonality amongst the file entries that may point to why this is happening.

  • Unshare everything and start by sharing a folder with just one subfolder that came up empty before. See if the contents of the subfolder show up. If not, it might be easier to figure out what's going wrong from just that one folder. If they do, you can keep adding folders to see if the problem starts happening at some point.

I realize these suggestions aren't ideal but like I said, I can't imagine what might be causing this as of yet.

Thanks, Nir

Submitted by scrambly on Wed, 09/14/2011 - 18:05.

But now I have to sheepishly post to the world that this was my own dumb mistake.

I'll take an example folder, /iTunes Media/adam sandler/ and all subfolders. My share showed files like the album art JPEGs and leftover desktop.ini files from when I was on Windows, but it didn't show MP3 files within that folder. But I know I have adam sandler songs .... the thing is, the MP3s aren't stored there. :( They are stored in /iTunes Media/music/adam sandler/ within the appropriate subfolders for the albums.

So when I thought that I wasn't sharing MP3 files (specifically) in those subfolders, it's because there are no MP3 files in those folders.

Somewhere along the line the directory structure for my music has obviously become quite unorganized through the use of iTunes. So now if I simply share /iTunes Media/music then all of my files will be shared.

Thanks for the help, sorry for the trouble, but your steps above helped me to identify this. A simple solution ... look at my files!

Take it easy, keep up the good work.