Music Manager Crashes

Fedex just dropped off my Karma and I was all excited to try it out. So I installed the hardware, downloaded the latest MM bundle from the Rio website, installed it..... and it crashes when scanning my music collection. In fact, it crashes almost immediatly upon starting to scan.

This is on a fairly recent fresh Windows XP installation so I doubt there are any conflicts. Anyone got any ideas or do I have a $300.00 paperweight now?

Uninstall (3 different programs*) and then tell it not to scan your computer for music when prompted after installation. I have to say on the 3 XP machines I loaded RMM on, I have not had this problem.

* Rio Music Manager, Rio Taxi, and Rio Internet Updater

Nope.. Im screwed there. It seems to know that MM has been installed before (I deleted the Rio folder out of /Program Files/Rio) and insists on rescanning my music folders.

Sigh....

I think the default folders it scans is:

c:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\My Music
c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\My Documents\My Music
c:\My Music

Maybe try moving your music out of those locations. It could be that RMM is choking on a file you have in there.

I deleted all those settings since I dont have any music in them. All my music is in E:\MP3s A-M and E:\MP3s N-Z. I guess I could renamed the folders so there's nothing there to scan.

try that

edit the location out of your registry. In win98se it is
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Rio\Rio Music Manager\2.0\source0 and then you have various root keys to delete or modify. I get the same thing when I attempt to load everything. It seems that its crashing with some bad tags, but I havent tried to isolate them. I only load directories that I want to upload now.

Not scanning the music seemed to get the program loaded. So I guess the question now is how do I get the music from my hard drive to the Karma without it scanning it first.

You can navigate your computer from inside RMM. Your music doesn't have to be scanned in order to upload tunes to the Karma.

Is that only in XP?

No. RMM has a "My Computer" pane. Alternatively, you can just open the Karma in RMM, and drop files directly onto the RMM window from Windows Explorer.

I got it working that way however I'd really like to use this software the way it's meant to be used. With that being said, what needs to happen to solve this crashing problem on scanning? Is there a new version of RMM coming anytime soon? Is there a beta? A debug version.. anything to help to get to the bottom of this?

Using it in this mode, RMM is more awkward than Windows software for the iPod and that's pretty bad.

Using it in this mode, RMM is more awkward than Windows software for the iPod and that's pretty bad.

Using it like you are seems a lot like the empeg to me, so I don't see it as a problem.

RMM is still being updated and developed further, so there will be newer versions. However, this may not fix your problem. It's likely that you have a file or files that are currupt in some way that RMM doesn't like. If you come across it, send it to me or someone else on the beta team and we will submit it to development.

To fix the problem it would be useful to get a copy of the track in your music library that is killing RMM. Unfortunately locating this is a little long winded:

Split your library in half and scan it. If it scans OK, add in half of the other half, otherwise remove half of the first half. Repeat until you have identified the problematic track by means of binary chop.

Probably not what you want to hear, but if you do identify the problem track please send it to me.

Thanks

Rob

How large is your music library?

Well.. I could go along with that except that almost all of the software for the iPod has to scan your music collection and Ive never had it balk at any of my music. So something may be tagged funky but the only software that seems to have a problem with it is RMM. Media Center 9, Musicmatch 8, iTunes, etc all works fine with my music folders so trying to blame it on my music and tagging is a bit of a cop out.

If RMM actually showed you what was being scanned then perhaps it would be a lot easier to narrow down but with as many songs as I have, there is no way I can track down 1 song that is giving RMM a fit without some sort of direction where to go with it.

Since it seems like it's happening really fast, and assuming that RMM scans in order, I'll take a look at the first 100 albums or so in Tag And Rename and see if anything comes up odd.

Also, my awkward statement goes to the effort it requires for playlist creation. Perhaps there is an easier method than I am using but since the Empeg software is excellent at this, I expected the same from RMM. Basically I want to be able to find a dir with music in it, send it to the Karma and have a playlist created based off of Artist - Album or dir name or whatever, like the Empeg software does. Here, I have to send the album, highlight it, right click, select New Playlist, type the name of the new playlist and then wait for the Karma to do it's thing. For 1 or 2 playlists, thats okay but for sending up 20GB of music, it's going to be a whip.

~40,000 files

Ill give this a try but it's not going to be easy. As a suggestion, Rob.. how about making RMM just skip files with bad tags?

As a suggestion, Rob.. how about making RMM just skip files with bad tags?

RMM isn't *supposed* to crash even if the tags are bad!

There may be nothing wrong with the track.

Rob

I'll take a look at the first 100 albums or so

Just take those first 100 albums or so and put them in a different location. Tell RMM to scan this location instead. If it barfs, then you're a lot closer to finding the problem tracks.

Just because MP3TS says that the tracks are OK doesn't mean that RMM won't barf on them.

So something may be tagged funky but the only software that seems to have a problem with it is RMM. ... so trying to blame it on my music and tagging is a bit of a cop out.

It's not a cop out. It's a diagnosis procedure. There's a bug in RMM -- it shouldn't crash, no matter how badly tagged your files are. Since it does crash, it'd be useful to find the track that makes it crash so that it can be fixed.

Ive already done about 100 albums and RMM went through them no problem. I assumed since RMM was crashing almost immediately that it would be one of the albums that started with a number or the letter A. I was wrong. I guess without knowing how it's scanning files (in what order), this is going to be a long process.

I can't believe that RMM doesn't have an option to turn on a log file to track its scanning activity. Finding out the "bad" track would then be a doddle. Does it really not have this ability, if not then why not ?

if not then why not ?

Well, you see, it's not supposed to crash...

I guess without knowing how it's scanning files (in what order), this is going to be a long process

It is scanning in Windows file structure order. A binary chop is by far the most efficient way to find the problem file. With 40K files you could expect to find the problem file in about 15 iterations worst case.

Rob

...yes, but when comsuming data that you can't control things will go wrong occasionally. So you always build in some logging, or at least I do. I'm quite shocked that RMM doesn't have anything like this.

Nowadays I would even attempt to offer to log the crash on the next run of RMM.

...yes, but when comsuming data that you can't control things will go wrong occasionally

I was being facetious... Remember, I returned my Karma because of instability problems. Though RMM worked flawlessly for me.

Interestingly enough I think I have tracked the problem down and its not an MP3 thats causing the program to choke, it seems to be a folder name.

Actually.. its either the playlist name or the folder name that's causing RMM to puke.

Someone with RMM make a folder called:

Various Artists - Living in Oblivion - The 80's Greatest Hits Volume

and a playlist called:

Various Artists - Living in Oblivion - The 80's Greatest Hits Volume.m3u

and see if it causes RMM to choke.

Not choking for me.

What's in the .m3u file?

That was my next move

Im going to attempt to attatch it so you guys can take a look. Its all hosed inside.. looks like Tag And Rename borked it up for some reason.

Yeah, that's definitely an invalid M3U file.

Okay, Cambridge guys, your M3U parsing code in RMM needs to handle bad M3Us gracefully. Specifically, files which are comprised simply of 3k worth of zero bytes.

Yea.. unfortunately this seems to be only half my problem. RMM is still crashing after removing the offending playlist. I may have another bad one. Guess Im going to have to go through all the albums manually and look at the playlists.

Can you elaborate a little on why it is you need these album playlists at all? The Karma automatically lets you browse by album using the tag info...

Remember, I returned my Karma because of instability problems. Though RMM worked flawlessly for me.

Weren't you the one who had to reinstall windows to insall RMM and the like?

Matthew

Because Winamp, etc uses them. It would be great if RMM just skipped them all together.

Weren't you the one who had to reinstall windows to insall RMM and the like?

Yeah that was me, but RMM wasn't the first app to act funky around that particular time. There was something corrupt either in my Windows installation or one of my programs... RMM was the only one that complained about a specific DLL, but I had one or two other apps/utils that either weren't working right or wouldn't install at all. So I can't really blame RMM for those problems, and since nobody else has had them, all evidence points to something that was goofy on my PC.

Nevertheless, allow me to amend my statement to say "RMM worked flawlessly after I reinstalled Windows and exorcised the demons from my computer."

Well.. after 6 hours of combing thousands of folders, I finally got RMM to load and read my library. Turns out I had 3 corrupted playlists scattered throughtout my music library that crashed RMM. Dunno how these playlists got there, I guess T&R went out to lunch when it created them.

That being said, I hope better m3u processing is being implemented into RMM. Granted I fixed the problem here with the help of the forum people but Joe Blow who buys a Karma and doesnt come to these forums is going to be pissed when they run into this problem on their own.

Various Artists - Living in Oblivion - The 80's Greatest Hits Volume

Hmmm... I actually have this one...

Okay, Cambridge guys, your M3U parsing code in RMM needs to handle bad M3Us gracefully. Specifically, files which are comprised simply of 3k worth of zero bytes.

It's a fair cop. FITNR. (Or, in fairness, possibly the release after that -- we might have already rolled the "next" release down the hill to QA.)

Peter

In case no one's said it yet, I'd like to send a big "thank you" to KungFuCow for having the perseverance to locate which files were giving RMM problems. He's helped improve the product by doing so.

Props to the man with the Gary Coleman avatar.

Thanks... Just glad to have gotten it working.

It's wierd that T&R did that with those playlists. Most of the music that had the offending playlists has been on my HD for a while so maybe Evgeny fixed that problem since then.

Funny, I use T&R too, I've looked at the playlist in an editor and it looks fine to me. All my other playlists are fine.