Database issues

[Finn]

Hi, I've been using the full version of Mezzmo for awhile now, and I find it quite a good media server. The issue I've been having lately is that my music files are not updating as I would like them to.

For instance, if I look in the artist folder (library/music/artists), whether it be through my ps3, or the mezzmo gui on my computer (windows 7 64 bit), I see multiple or duplicate files of the same song for a certain artist where I know I only have one of.

I've also been updating the tags in my music files, and I don't think that information is being updated in my music database within mezzmo.

I have recently deleted the folder I was sharing for all of my music (some 35,000 files), so basically I am not sharing any music files, yet I still see those files under the artist, filetype, genre and year folders. I would like to clear my entire music database within mezzmo and start from scratch.

One of my questions is where is the database stored within windows? If I delete this file, surely the library in mezzmo will be clear of all data and I can start from scratch with updating my files.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank You

[Paul]

Hi,

Did you run Maintenance after removing files and did you select "Remove files" in it?

Tags should be re-read during maintenance too.

The database is located in a folder like this (on Windows 7), of course replace <username> with your own:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Conceiva\Mezzmo

And yes, if you delete all .db files there, it'll start from scratch.

[Finn]

Hi. Yes I tried that with that option ticked, and Mezzmo would end up 'not responding'.

Anywya, I've deleted the database (found it not long after I posted the original message), and reloaded all my files. It all looks good, except when I look at a particular artist, I am still seeing duplicate of the same file where there should only be one.

Any ideas???

Thanks

[Paul]

Is the duplicate in a dynamic folder, normal playlist, smart or active playlist? Can you please send a screenshot of that (post it here or send to support e-mail).

[Finn]

Ok. I've been playing around with this the last week and have had some success and some failures.

Have not been able to resolve the duplicate file entry, but then again I haven't really looked too hard. I don't think I've got any playlists attached to these particular files. I have to investigate this further.

On the tag updating issue, Mezzmo is definately not updating this information. I've spent a lot of time updating my tag information (title, artist, album artist, and album art) using mp3 tag (great program of which I'm still learning all the different types of commands to make 'tagging' easier). Once I have finishing updating my tags, I've been running the maintenance command. I have the 'Remove files' option ticked, and that has been working successfully. I've only just started trialling the 'Updating information about media files' option. In the past I've had this unticked as I had accidently had the 'Update all information for all media files' ticked, and Mezzmo would proceed to download album art from the internet of which some were incorrect, and I didn't need as all my music files already have album art. I've gone back to using the 'updating information about media files' option, but having the 'Only update where information is missing' with 'get media properties from file' option only ticked. At this stage I'm only interested in having my artist information updating, and I'm finding this is not the case after the maintenance command has finished.

I've tried deleting all the database files from C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Conceiva\Mezzmo, and then building my database again. This works great as I find all the tag information is properly updated, but a new issue has crept in where I can no longer see Mezzmo on the network on any of my media players. I have a feeling that one of the files (about 5 '*'.db files and one '*'.ini file) corresponds to Mezzmo being broadcast and should not be deleted. The only way I can fix this problem is to unistall Mezzmo and reinstall the program and then rebuild my database. Which of these database files should I NOT be deleting.

I'm not sure if there is an error in the Mezzmo program which doesn't update all tag information, or if it's just user error and my method is incorrect.

Otherwise I'm finding Mezzmo a great program. It's a little slow when navigating on my ps3 to the files that I want to play (well, it's slower than tversity), and it doesn't play my music files as gapless (ie. there is always a delay when finishing one file and starting the next), but it certainly plays all of my files with no issues (audio and video), and it plays them on my samsung tv, so for that I am happy.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Paul]

If you run Maintenance with "Update missing information" and there's already an Artist filled in, it won't be re-read from the file again (since it's not missing, but just different) - is that what you're experiencing? Or it doesn't read in the Artist (for example) even when it's empty? Perhaps there needs to be an option to update information if it's different or missing.

Regarding deleting files - most likely it's the .ini file that is responsible for the server going down like that, so don't delete the .ini if you wish to re-create the DBs, but keep the connection settings the same.

[Finn]

Correct. In my case the artist field was filled, then I've changed that field, but the database stays with the originally content. For instance, a file originally had the artist field 'Bon Jovi', but I've changed it to 'Jon Bon Jovi', but the database continues to read it as 'Bon Jovi'.

The reason I've been updating my 'artist' information is because I have some 45,000 mp3's, and I find that I can have in some cases 5 or 6 separate artist names for the same artist due to slightly different spellings, or differences in upper/lower case, etc. If I want to play all my music from a single artist via my media player, it can't be done unless the artist field spelling, punctuation etc for that artist is exactly the same for all files. If there was an option to update the tag information even though it was previously filled, that would be awesome.

I'll try deleting the database files and not the ini and see if I have the same problem.

Thanks so much for answering this question and all other questions in this forum. It's nice to know that if you have a problem, there is someone on hand to attempt to solve the problem.

Cheers

[Paul]

Sure, so basically if we had an option to re-read all information from the files, except for album art, that would work for you?

Thanks for the kind feedback - I'm glad to help :)

[Finn]

Yes it would.

Thanks heaps.

[Rainey]

The real issue is you should not have to redo to whole database just to update some files.

You should be able to select a file or files and update them as a small group.

Mezzmo does not really have the ability to update tags in the file only read them.
If you want to add some feature to mezzmo then you should add tagging features.

Most media database program/players have the ability to get tags from the internet and write them to the files.
Most let you do this to the selected file(s) so you are in control of what gets changed. When using mezzmo with a very large database the maintenance process takes a long time, if it every completes without hanging, and once it is done you do not know what all got changed without having logging on and reading the logs. With a very large database this is not working well.

What would be nice is like in MS media Player, you can drag and drop files to change the tags in the database and once done write those database changes to the files tags. For example if you had songs from a artist and the artists name was spelled 5 different ways then you drag and drop the files to the correct spelling and then write the changes to the files.

I like the OP, did not understand adding/maintenance feature at first and when adding or running maintenance i had 10000 files that are video clips from web sites that it added artwork for but of course none of them had the correct art work as there is not correct art work for them. I manually deleted the artwork and the next time i ran maintenance i unchecked update artwork, but it still searched the internet and added artwork again. Later i found i had to disable the artwork feature under the options menu and then it stopped trying to find artwork for those files that have none.

[Paul]

Thank you for the suggestion regarding a taggin feaure - it's on our future to-do list, so we'll consider it at some stage.

You can run maintenance on individual files or playlists, you don't have to maintain your whole database every time.

Also, the upcoming 2.5 has enhancements in this area, so it should finish up quicker and be more stable.

[Paul]

Just an update - Mezzmo v2.5 has been released and it includes the improvements that we mentioned in this thread.

[wise.guys]

I am having a similar problem in the video tagging part. I can go to the video file, right click on it and have it search for the proper tag and art work, it then gives me a list of possible tags, I can choose the correct one and it will tag it properly as well as add the art work, but when I back out of the folder the video file was in the Art work that shows is one that was previously put in the file that was wrong, not the updated one. Could a new feature be put in where it asks you if you want to over write all the old information including artwork and the actual file name? Basically embed all the information that you chose into the file.

[Paul]

Sorry - I don't quite understand. When you change the artwork for a file in the Properties dialog in Mezzmo, it will be saved into your Mezzmo library and that is what should be displayed in Mezzmo and on your devices for that file. If this is not happening, then let us know the steps to reproduce the problem and we'll fix it up. If it helps, post or email some screenshots to help us understand. You can email them to support [at] conceiva [dot] com.

[Whimick]

Hi, I seems to be having database problems.

Yesterday I wend to stream some media as usual, and found that my database had been wiped, and then became unusable.

The only way to get Mezzmo up and running again was to completely remove it and re-install again.

This is about the third time its happened.

Any idea this is happening to me?

Michael

[Paul]

Hi Michael,

We have not seen databases being wiped from user reports. A few users recently lost their top level playlists (Library, Music, Photos, Video) and we helped them recover them.

When/if this problem happens again, we really need you to contact us immediately so we can see what has happened in the database files. That way we can fix the issue. So, please email us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com when/if it happens again.