Fwd: Re: Someone please fix the 30-character bug

[Mats Ahlgren]

[sorry, didn't hit reply-all, so forwarding to list]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Someone please fix the 30-character bug
Date: Saturday 10 February 2007
From: Mats Ahlgren <mats_a at mit.edu>
To: Martin Aumueller <aumuell at reserv.at>

On Saturday 10 February 2007 10:47:09 you wrote:
> Unfortunately, your report is not helpful: bug 100742 seems to be related to 
> tag recoding. This option is not any longer available in the 1.4 series, so 
> the reason for your bug has to be different.
> 
> But you do not give any information how to reproduce your problem:
Unfortunately I cannot. The bug appears to occur randomly and is truly insidious to track down.

All my attempts to reproduce have failed, but I still see the bug all the time. For example, just now I changed the title of a song. When I opened it up again in the metadata editor, it had exactly 30 characters (though the title on the playlist did not yet reflect this). Rechanging the name of the song and repeating my actions could not reproduce the bug.

> - what tags (id3v1, id3v2.3, id3v.2.4, ...) do your files have before you use 
> amarok?
Please tell me how to check if needed (see below for why it might not be needed).

> - what do you have to do in amarok in order to trigger this problem?
see above; it seems to happen after making a change to metadata, but otherwise I just stumble across songs which have corrupt (truncated) metadata

> - how do you notice that the tags have been trunacated? Could it be that they 
> have been rewritten as id3v2.4 and that your external software is not capable 
> of reading them? (Happens with id3lib based software, such as easytag, ...)
I'm not using / don't use external software. Doesn't tag-encoding not being used anymore in 1.4.4 imply this is a problem with Amarok's database and/or metadata-editor code?

> Please supply this information and other hints that might possibly be helpful.

I've provided as much as I know in my previous email: namely that:
- This effects at least the artist + title + album fields
- This effect may occur after changing metadata with Amarok's metadata editor, but if it does the changes are not immediately apparent; e.g. they won't be reflected in the context browser or playlist. This might also occur to songs that I've never editted data for, but I'm not sure.
- Sometimes this will occur to an entire album (all songs will have their album data truncated to 30 characters; I can't remember if I was using the right-click-on-album change-album-metadata functionality at the time)

I've been trying to track this bug down for awhile. I even did periodic backups of my database for just the purpose of tracking all 30-character metadata fields. I haven't found any hint as to what might be causing this. (Albeit I have not looked at the code.)

Sincerely,
Mats

> On Sat Feb 10 2007, Mats Ahlgren wrote:
> > addendum:
> > Additionally I've noticed this problem across distributions.
> >
> > On Saturday 10 February 2007 10:26:35 Mats Ahlgren wrote:
> > > Below is a friendly but urgent suggestion:
> > >
> > > Amarok randomly truncates metadata fields (albums, titles, artists,
> > > anything) to 30 characters.
> > >
> > > I've mentioned this bug before on the mailing list.
> > > It's been posted on bugs.kde.org --
> > > http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100742 but no one will re-open it.
> > >
> > > I've noticed this bug constantly for at least the past 1.5 years, from
> > > Amarok 1.2.* (I think?) through 1.4.4!
> > >
> > > Metadata corruption is a serious problem and most users would not
> > > tolerate it.
> > >
> > > This is the last time I'm going to suggest that this serious bug be
> > > fixed.
> > >
> > > Sincerely,
> > > Mats
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Amarok mailing list
> > > Amarok at kde.org
> > > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Amarok mailing list
> > Amarok at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok
> 



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