Issues/Hang with network song folders Windows 10

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JimNYC
Posts: 40

Post by JimNYC »

I had tried to setup Synthesia to use a Network share (from a mapped Drive) for the midi songs. The drive came up and I was able to navgiate to the folder and add it, but I had 2 issues:

1) when I would set up the share and navigate to the right folder, it would say "20 songs found on the bottom" as an example, but after I added it, it then showed 0 songs in all folders on that screen. When I tried to play a song from that folder, it also did not show any.

2) When I would go back into the folder setup, the program would hang completely. I had to disconnect from the network and then it would let me in where I could at least delete the network folder location.

I tried this on 2 separate devices running the latest Windows 10, both with the same behavior.

I moved files to a local directory, and that is working fine. I didn't see any reports about this -- should this work with network locations?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

(Sorry for the multi-month wait!)

Hmm, I don't see anything in my notes about network shares, even if I can vaguely remember hearing this in the past. (Although, that might have just been from quickly skimming this the first time in February.)

I just tried the same situation but didn't have any trouble. Synthesia was able to scan and load songs from a network share between Windows 10 computers the same as it does locally. Returning to the scanned folder list (even after restarting the app) behaved normally.

I can't imagine the Synthesia 10.7 release (since your post) has changed anything, but if you get the latest version a try, does the problem still happen?
JimNYC
Posts: 40

Post by JimNYC »

I just tried this on a different computer with the latest Synthesia 10.8.5686. The same thing happens -- Synthesia just ends up spinning with a (Not Responding) in the title bar.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Windows Explorer - create a Network Share mapped to a drive (X: in my example)
2) In Synthesia, go to Songs and add a new folder. Select Computer and the new network mapped drive shows up. I can navigate to the subfolder I want fine. It shows 31 songs found in this folder in the folder selection box.
3) Click Add. It comes back to the Synthesia settings page with the folder listed showing 0 songs in all folders. But then it just hangs and locks up the program completely.

It works fine if I choose a folder on a local drive.

I can reproduce it consistently.
JimNYC
Posts: 40

Post by JimNYC »

Update - I just tried this with a different file server and it worked.

So it has to do with the type of file server it is I guess. The one I use is my main one running off an old Windows XP Workstation.

The one that worked is a network wdmycloud network drive.
icuurd12b42
Posts: 48

Post by icuurd12b42 »

Maybe your other server was in sleep mode...
JimNYC
Posts: 40

Post by JimNYC »

icuurd12b42 wrote: 12-04-21 2:38 pm Maybe your other server was in sleep mode...
Definitely not...It was being used on other machines and also on the same machine copying files in Windows Explorer.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I just dredged up an old XP machine, (reluctantly connected it to my network), made a file share, mapped it on my dev machine, and was able to reproduce the problem.

It's a strange bug. It's getting stuck in an infinite loop while trying to break down all the little pieces of the file path (so it can associate a song with "grouped by folder" path in the song list).

Apparently when you ask whether "M:\" has a parent, Windows responds with "Yes, and its parent is M:\". So trying to "walk" the path all the way back up to the root just keeps going forever. In just a few seconds I have a path consisting of 19k pieces, all of which are "M:\". *sigh* (So technically it's not just a hang; it'll also turn into an out-of-memory error if you wait long enough!) :anxious:

On non-XP shares, that terminates the way it ought to. For XP shares, there is an error code that is returned when asking whether they're equivalent (that I wasn't checking before).

Now, when there's an error, I just check to see if the strings are equal ("Is 'M:\' the same as 'M:\'?") as a fallback. And just for good measure, it'll stop building tiny path pieces after 50 steps. Hopefully no one has more than 50 levels of sub-folder! :lol:

So this should be fixed in the next preview. Thanks for the report.
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