To what does ‘undefined’ refer?

[Tim Curtis]

Happy Monday!

I use XLD to rip CDs before adding the resultant files to my music library. Yesterday I ripped a CD for the first time in many months. Before ripping I update XLD to the latest version and I see something in my library that I’ve not seen before. See attached image; to what does ‘Undefined’ refer?

How do you move the files to your library?
I see those messages when I copy files using sftp. The application creates an additional 0 byte file starting with ._ (i.e. copying "track1.flac" also results in a "._track1.flac" file.)
To me it seems the CyberDuck (on macOS) application is responsible for generating those files.

Those are the annoying MacOS hidden dot files i.e. resource fork files. They are created by macOS to store extra info about files and folders for example file metadata, icons, alias names etc.

The problem is that they get copied by programs that don't explicitly exclude them and if they end up in your music collection MPD will index them and duplicates will appear :-0

Your best bet when copying music files from a Mac to a moode system is to turn on SMB (Samba) file sharing in moode (it filters out the hidden dot files), connect to the moode SMB share from your Mac and use Finder to copy the files.

If your collection is on a NAS there are prolly options in its SMB file sharing service to filter out hidden dot files. The SMB config options are like below.

Code:

veto files = /._*/.DS_Store/
delete veto files = yes

ETA: There is also the dot_clean utility on MacOS if you want to delete the files right on the Mac. I've never used it.

Code:

lt5user@LT5 ~ % dot_clean -h    
usage: dot_clean  [-fhmnpsv] [--keep=[mostrecent|dotbar|native]] [directory ...]

f : flat.    Disables recursive conversion.
h : help.    Print this message.
m : Always delete apple double files.
n : Delete apple double file if there is no matching native file.
p : Preserve apple double file
s : Follow symbolic links.
v : Verbose