Library loading fails

[swizzle]

Just checked. Even the files with "not valid FLAC bitstream" show no problems when accessed via the folder view. The music plays and the album art is shown.

In Configure > Library try turning on the “ignore cue files” setting.

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Gustav752 

You said

BTW for tagging I usually use mp3tag in default mode.

There's a lot of nice things to say about Mp3tag (I have a copy myself; even made a financial donation just as I do for moOde). It's great that it can tag FLAC formatted files among many others. 

However, the FLAC specification says specifically that FLAC files shall be tagged using a VORBIS COMMENT block only. Mp3tag can read and will populate a VORBIS COMMENT block but *by default* it also appends an ID3V2 tag at the end beginning of the file along with a special marker at the beginning of the file so the file no longer begins with the signature "fLaC" characters and the flac-encoded audio begins after the ID3v2 tag. Some programs can cope with this, some can't. Either way, the result violates the FLAC specification.

When tagging FLAC files with Mp3tag, go to the Tools>Options>Tags>Mpeg and disable writing of ID3v1, IDEv2, and APEv2 tags. Back in the view panel, for FLAC files the Tag column should display FLAC (FLAC). [Full disclosure: I haven't ripped any tracks in more than a year and may be mis-remembering some of these details.]

Can't comment on the original "Library loading fails" issue. I'd have to create a test library to see if mal-tagging is to mal-tagging and I have other things to do ATM.

Regards,
Kent

ETA - I post-edited this message to correct my error in describing where the ID3v2 tag is placed. I was working from memory and mixing up ID3v1 and IDv2.

[Tim Curtis]

Hard to say what might be going on.

Couple things to try:

1. Open the Web Browser Javascript console and look for errors when switching to Tag or Album view.
2. Zip up some of the FLAC files and PM a download link to Myself, @Nutul and @TheOldPresbyope. One of us will see if we can reproduce any errors or no covers.

[Gustav752]

Many thanks for your help so far.

I am not the greatest computer expert but I have the feeling that the "not valid bitstream" error messages are maybe not the cause but an effect of the problem.

Just checked the SD card. The 32GB card contains a FAT32 partition called "boot" sized 268MB of which 37,8MB is used. The remaining 31,6GB are unformatted.

To my layman's mind, that seems to be very little. Could it be that the partition is simply too small for storing my not exactly small metadata library? I have not found any information in the Moode documentation on when and how to expand the boot partition.

I used the Pi imager und followed your setup guide for creating the card.

[Nutul]

@Nutul

Are you sure that some files tagged in the id3v2 format can be the reason for 'Album View' not working at all in my Moode setup? As said above, Moode finds the cover art when in 'Folder View' but does not load the library when in Cover View.

BTW for tagging I usually use mp3tag in default mode. I don't remember playing around with different ID3 settings. In the past this worked with Moode and it still works fine with Innuos and Minimserver.

Interestingly, entire albums are never affected by this "not valid bistream" error, only individual files. If my tagging is the cause of the problems, I would have expected something else, as I always tag complete albums in the same way.

I have no other reason for the thumbnail extractor to fail.
I remember in the past also DSD files (which use id3v2.x tag too) failed with the same error because the id3v2 library extractor expect such tag (as is found in MP3s) at offset 0 in the file, while DSDs have such offset written in their header, but the library wasn't aware...

Try to retag correctly, using Vorbis Comment to one album (that is, all its files...) and do a rescan of the thumbnails (and also clear the browser's cache...) and see if that results in a fix.

[Tim Curtis]

Many thanks for your help so far.

I am not the greatest computer expert but I have the feeling that the "not valid bitstream" error messages are maybe not the cause but an effect of the problem.

Just checked the SD card. The 32GB card contains a FAT32 partition called "boot" sized 268MB of which 37,8MB is used. The remaining 31,6GB are unformatted.

To my layman's mind, that seems to be very little. Could it be that the partition is simply too small for storing my not exactly small metadata library? I have not found any information in the Moode documentation on when and how to expand the boot partition.

I used the Pi imager und followed your setup guide for creating the card.

The uSD card has two partitions: bootfs and rootfs. Bootfs contains the system boot files and firmware and is formatted as VFAT (Fat32) which is visible in most OS's. Rootfs contains RaspiOS, moOde and any song files copied directly to it. It's formatted as Ext4 which is only viewable in Linux.

Code:

pi@moode-test2:~ $ sudo blkid -o list
device          fs_type  label   mount point     UUID
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/mmcblk0p1  vfat     bootfs  /boot/firmware  018C-2700
/dev/mmcblk0p2  ext4     rootfs  /               8c55512a-ead1-46ab-a547-f232ae1edbf6

The rootfs partition is automatically expanded to the size of the uSD card at first boot. Partition sizes and disk space usage can be viewed using the commands below. Disk usage is also printed in moOde System info.

Code:

pi@moode-test2:~ $ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk0     179:0    0 29.7G  0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0  512M  0 part /boot/firmware
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0 29.2G  0 part /

Code:

pi@moode-test2:~ $ df -h
Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                     29G  3.8G   24G  14% /
devtmpfs                     3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs                        4.0G     0  4.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                        1.6G  6.2M  1.6G   1% /run
tmpfs                        5.0M   64K  5.0M   2% /run/lock
/dev/mmcblk0p1               510M   63M  448M  13% /boot/firmware
tmpfs                        806M     0  806M   0% /run/user/1000
//lt5/Software/moode-player  234G  126G  109G  54% /mnt/moode-player

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Gustav752 

On the matter of tagging FLAC files:

I don't recall if I ever found a convenient way to mass-edit FLAC files to remove an ID3V2 tag and, if necessary, write the same metadata into a VORBIS COMMENT block. I also don't know what useful Tagging tools besides Mp3tag exist for MacOS. I work in Linux and there are quite a few choices (I run the Windows Mp3tag.exe in PlayOnLinux/Wine). When I was still ripping CDs I found MusicBrainz Picard to be useful for tagging all the tracks in an album.

If I had to fix a lot of mis-tagged FLAC files today, I'd probably first write a Python program to automate the process, taking advantage of the wonderful Mutagen module.

You may find this old thread on the "MP3TAG Community" board useful if you choose to use Mp3tag on a file-by-file basis: Removing ID3 tags from FLAC files.

Regards,
Kent

[the_bertrum]

It's been a long time since I tried, but if you have MP3TAG set to not put ID3 tags into FLAC files, then selecting all the files you want to fix, then CTRL+X (cut) followed by CTRL-V (paste) will sort it out.

At least it did about 3 years ago when I did it on my collection.

[TheOldPresbyope]

It's been a long time since I tried, but if you have MP3TAG set to not put ID3 tags into FLAC files, then selecting all the files you want to fix, then CTRL+X (cut) followed by CTRL-V (paste) will sort it out.

At least it did about 3 years ago when I did it on my collection.

Nice. Obviously my memory is worse than yours   

Regards,
Kent

[Gustav752]

Update:

In the meantime I cleaned the library from all ID3 infected FLAC files. With the help of a friend knowing Linux I scanned the library via SSH and then deleted all ID3 entries from FLAC files with mp3tag. Only about 100 albums where affected so it was possible to do this by hand without looking for more complicated batch solutions.

Moode works now as expected. Thank you very much for putting me on the right track!

Still, I'm a bit confused because this problem mainly affected old rips that were made a long time ago and worked fine with older Moode versions. It seems Moode changed the handling of FLACs with ID3 tags sometime in the last 18 months.