Questions about MusicFab

[supine]

Update: Totally uninstalled MusicFab, rebooted (again), Reinstalled and restarted MusicFab, Logged back into Spotify, Repopulated the download list, and restarted the downloads. It looks like I'm back in business. So far, everything is behaving optimally. The previously reported glitches still happened though. I would appreciate it if the team would look into them. There was an error logging into Spotify after re-installing MusicFab. It's happened before. I had to abandon using Gmail to log in, The work-around was to go in under my E-mail address; but that's a work-around not a fix.

Edit: A file was created on my desktop called "myeasylog.log". It's evidentially in use by MusicFab. If it's a troubleshooting log, I would be happy to send it to you... but it's empty. there is nothing in it. It's an eyesore sitting there, but under the circumstances, if it might help, I'll leave it there.

The new windows generated, are still populating on top of my work. This is a program that seems destined to run in the background. Having windows populate "on top" and interrupting my work is more than just an inconvenience. During this edit, MusicFab crashed off of the screen again. I restarted it and it's working fine, however, as I'm trying to type this, MusicFab is continually throwing windows up and interrupting my typing every few seconds. For a while, I had thought that the "Windows on top" issue had been addressed; but when I restarted MusicFab, it really became a major pain in my....

Edit to the Edit: Just a note; after dismissing what seemed like twenty five or thirty windows, the new windows started relegating themselves to the background again. I don't know what I did to make them stay in the background, but I was a happy camper. After several minutes, I opened one of those background windows (By the way, there were only two of them. That's very good work!) to check on a file. Bad move. It was several more minutes before I could stop the Windows from populating on top again. As I write this, I am not having my work interrupted every few seconds, but I want you to know it's still hit or miss. I still don't know what I did to get those Windows to stop populating "on top". (I know you're working on it, Thanks)

[supine]

After crashing and disappearing off the screen, I restarted MusicFab. It downloaded one file and ostensibly went on to the next. The animated Icon was showing a download, but there was no status bar active on anything. After waiting for five minutes with no results, I paused the downloads, and restarted them. Or tried to at least, to no avail. The download Icon would go active, but there was no active status bar or any other activity happening. Closing and restarting MusicFab did nothing to alleviate the problem. The words "Accessing Video Information" appeared momentarily in a dialog box when I tried to restart the downloads, the download Icon animated, and nothing else happened. It looks like we still have major problems. ....Rats! Just as I thought there was a handle on this. I am going to reboot the machine, and post an edit to let you know what happened.

Edit: Still nothing. The first album opened when I clicked "Start Download" after rebooting and restarting MusicFab. "Accessing Video Information" appeared momentarily in a dialog box; the animated download Icon appeared then nothing else. "Wait to download" appeared beside every file in the open album. A quick check of the other albums in the que revealed no active status bar or download. After several minutes, I realized that nothing was going to happen, in spite of the animated download Icon still moving. The active portion of the program is effectively shut down, and MusicFab has become useless again. I have shut the program down and am waiting on a reply from Staff or Moderator. Thank you.

[supine]

Well.. Not only am I back, so is the "Protected Playback Not Enabled" browser error. Well, I thought we had a handle on everything. Hoping anyway. The new disc error was probably just something that was hiding and didn't come out in testing. I gather the "Protected Playback" error hid during testing also. Perhaps it's time for a larger beta group or test pool. I can hardly wait for the next update.

[supine]

OK, I'm back! That was fast. I downloaded a double album, (The Essential Lou Rawls) and both disks went into a single folder. Seems like another issue. Evidentially, when the single album Disc 1 issue was fixed, it created another problem.

[supine]

I just updated to 1.0.0.4. So far, everything looks good. The "Fab Team" got rid of the annoying Disk 1 folder on single disc albums, The high error rate seems to be gone as well as the truncated files. As a matter of fact, out of the fifty or so files I had in the latest "Batch", none have errored out, nor were the files truncated. The U.I. did not freeze, and no error screens appeared in the browser portion of the program, allowing me to select music. These were the major issues I came across while using the program. The track numbering has changed from square brackets ([12]Song I Like) to an underscore (12_Song I Like). Since there is no standard numbering format and everyone likes something different, I can't throw too many rocks. I don't like the new numbering format myself, but let's face it. At this point, it's just minutia. If that's all I'm bothered by, I believe that the team can claim success. The team has done an outstanding job (so far) of ironing out the major bugs. This update seems to have addressed all of the critical usability issues that have plagued the software since its release. I really feel (so far) that the "Fab Team" has gotten a solid handle on the major issues. The rest is just evaluating user input for (minor?) suggestions and tweaks to the software. Good job team!

You may have noticed that I have used the words "so far" several times. Lets address another issue that is out of the "Fab Teams" hands. The streaming services are most likely not fans of this kind of software. There is a possibility, that each service has somebody (or a team of somebody's) in development, right now, working to cripple this type of software. They may succeed. If they do manage to work a curve ball in there, my bet is still on the "Fab Team". If anything else goes awry, or bugs (new or old) start to work their way back into the software, "I'll be back!" Thanks again team.

[supine]

Rebooted the machine, Closed the program and restarted it in the "Admin" mode. It did well for a while. The high failure rate was still there, The files that it manage to get were complete. I cannot comment on the truncation problem however, MusicFab crashed and disappeared off the screen. Even the TSR part was gone. The sample I managed to collect was to small for the "Truncation" problem to surface. I repeated the experiment, and it went smooth for a while then crashed again. This time a report was sent, but something went wrong there also, and I was unable to leave remarks (or anything else) in the report.
I hope this information helps.

[supine]

Please extst the program first and then run it as administrator to see the result.

Will do. I'll let you know what happens.

[Hedy]

Oookay... I didn't expect an answer until Monday. After receiving no response to my queries today (Monday) I totally deleted Musicfab and reinstalled it. There was an update after I reinstalled it. That's good. I wiped out everything I downloaded before, and started over. So far, the songs I have listened to that have come in have not been truncated. Whew! Now there is a new issue. In the "Downloading" section, I can see the Spotify list but it appeared that it would not not open for me to view or delete files from the list. After several minutes, I moved the Window with my mouse, and was able to see a partial list. After moving the window again, the view updated, but the U.I. appears to be frozen and I am unable to do anything in it. Songs are failing (still) and I could not scroll down the list or see an accurate view of where the list was. It seemed (again) frozen. I found that by "grabbing" the window with my mouse and moving it from side to side it updated the view in the window allowing me (with difficulty) to restart the songs that had failed, Which transferred flawlessly on the second attempt. I still don't know what's going on there or why they fail. The U.I. in the downloading section is still "freezing", useless, and the view in the U.I. Window, will not update at all unless I move the window with my mouse. (Windows 10). Has anyone else reported these problems?
Again, Is there any way to get rid of those annoying .lrc files and get the lyrics remuxed into the files meta data? Putting the albums by a single artist in a folder under the artists name would be nice too. I'll listen to the rest of the music over the next few days, and let you know if any more files get truncated. Hopefully I'll hear a reply to this post before then. Thank you in advance for your help.

Please extst the program first and then run it as administrator to see the result.

[Hedy]

Earlier I posted a question about a problem with Musicfab logging in through Google. In Musicfab, I got an error preventing me from logging into Spotify through Google, saying that the browser was not secure. I can't find it in the thread. Was it moved? If so, I never got an E-mail. I was wondering if this is a known problem, and if there are plans to fix it. I can start another thread, but the topic of this one is Questions about Musicfab. I know this is a pretty broad topic, but it's nice to have a place where people can upload questions about Musicfab without creating a thread concerning the topic of each question.

Please delete the two folders and then run MusicFab to try again and see the result.
%HOMEPATH%/Documents/MusicFab/MusicFab/Temp
%HOMEPATH%/Documents/MusicFab/MusicFab/log

[supine]

Well... Re-downloading everything worked. Spotify never gave me back all 31 albums that I had, and I (stupidly) deleted the truncated albums before I went to re-download the list. While I'm sure the missing albums are still available, if I don't know the names of the ones I'm missing, I can't search for them. Later on, I'll get a discography list from an online source and fill in the blanks.
It's after the files came in that the tedium set in. I felt compelled to go through every track in every album to do a (Not so quick) check for truncation. While I was in the files; if it was only a single album, I got rid of all the "Disc 1" folders, and added album cover art to every folder (Folder.jpg). The visual aid in adding cover art to the folders is invaluable to me. Rather than having to read the title of the folders, it is easier and faster for me to do a quick visual scan for the cover art or folder art. Since every album is stored under the artists name, it makes searches quick and to the point. I do the same thing with event photography. It makes it easier to upload the files I want to my phone.

I came in this morning to a huge list of download failures, but the U.I. was still working. That made it easy to restart them all, and they came in with no problem.

I hope the team irons out the bugs quickly. Having this software is going to be nice when they do. I live in a very rural area, and Spotify is sometimes hit or miss because of poor cell service in the area. While I have a couple of lists downloaded under the Spotify interface, I just don't like being "slaved" to those lists (or the Spotify interface.). With this software I can upload a few artists, or mixed albums in a specific genre to my phone, and when I get sick of it, all I have to do is (Boop!) delete them to make room for more. If I want it back again, "Click" there it is! Downloaded again. It's kind of like checking books out from the library. If I want to re-read something, it's still there, just not taking up room in my house. I used to burn "CDs" for my truck. Now that I can link my phone to it, that's a thing of the past (and the " burned CDs" are in the trash.) Out of the truck? No problem. Wireless headphones. I can also "Cast" to my T.V. that's connected to my living room sound system. Technology is great! (When it works). The best part is; I have a sore spot when it comes to the Spotify interface. no more fumbling through three or four screens to find what I want. (I only have to do that once to get it on my phone.) Spotify also has a problem if I want to play a discography, with every album complete and in order. A list of songs from the artist? Yeah... it does that. Albums? yeah, it does that too. Easily play one album after another by the same artist, in order, without a play list? (or) Easily play one complete album after another by artists in a specific genre? Not so much. I know, most people don't listen like that; but I often get hooked on an artist or genre, and like to listen to complete albums, in order, the way the artist intended the music to be listened to. (with intros, and extros; The whole experience!) I especially like doing this without fumbling through a clumsy interface to load the next album as the previous one ends. Especially when I'm traveling.
Yeah.... once this software looses some bugs, I think I'm going to like it. In fact, in spite of the exasperation I'm going through now; I think I like taking advantage of it already.

[supine]

Hehe... Yeah... Me too (DVDFab I mean) Wonderful "Fab" program. It's gone through some shaky stretches, but over all, I've been very happy with it.

I just downloaded an artist Discography in M4a (Some hardware still doesn't support FLAC (Lossless). My truck being one of those.). Out of 31 albums, 27 had every song truncated less than ten seconds into each track. If you're familiar with Spotify, I'm sure that you understand, getting that many albums from the same artist loaded in que, took some time and effort. Clicking on the see Discography doesn't always bring up all the albums in their library for a particular artist. Since I have downloaded other albums successfully, I have loaded the list into the que and am retrying the files. While I was doing this, MusicFab quit pulling up a list of tracks from the album I clicked on, to import into the que. Fortunately, When I exited the program, it saved the ones that I had already loaded into the que. After a precautionary reboot, I was able to continue where I left off. I'll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.

[ord1117]

Hi Supine,

My Spotify Program works Good,

Meta Data works good

Download in FLAC

Sometimes Spotify Changes things, but THEIR support team fix's things if there is a problem.

Spotify is NOT Good with Comedy Stuff.

We will see what Happens with Music Fab.

Things Change with FAB, things Disappear, and they stop supporting things.

Things wind UP NOT Doing what they said, So they change the name etc, or it Disappears.

I have had DVDfab for several Years, Mostly for Ripping.

[supine]

I've been re-reading some of my posts. I noticed that I have expressed a deep belief in the "Fab" software team several times. I think it's worth mentioning, that I receive no free software or incentives from "Fab" software or anyone affiliated with them. In spite of the issues I currently face with this fledgling project, these are true endorsements. Although I have had "issues" with their software before, they have, in the long run, never let me down. so far...

[supine]

Except for the genre and lyrics, the Meta Data seems to be populating fine. I usually get rid of the Spotify download information in comments though. I have no problem populating the genre in the Meta Data. My problem is the .lrc files that litter the directory. Yes... Having the lyrics is good. Having to copy and paste them from a .lrc file into the tag is not. I would rather have a way of making them not show up at all. I can probably find a tagging program that will populate the lyrics in the tag. In fact, I believe I have one. Forum etiquette however prevents me from mentioning the name. A quick search would probably give you the name though.

If you have another Spotify program, then you know this one is a little steep price wise. What I have run into though, is other programs eventually stop working. While I'm sure promises are made, other software, in my experience, has tended to not be reliable if a real curve is thrown their way by the streaming services. I hope your Mods come in in a timely fashion, and you get your software back up. Who knows? This endeavor may fall flat too. I just like the track record of this company from experience. It's worth a shot.

[ord1117]

I have a Program for Spotify that I like.

I am just waiting for more Modules.

Sounds like they are having trouble with the Meta Data.