MusicMagic: some songs not mixable in Slimserver

[madfuzu]

Hi

I'm having a problem mixing my music with MusicMagic/MusicIP/Predixis (whatever it's called now!)

Here are two of the best examples (there are plenty of others):

I have two albums from the band Ash. When I Browse Artists, select Ash, All Songs, the songs for both albums are listed together sorted by title. All the songs (from either album) starting with letters up to "P" have the MM symbol indicating that they're mixable. Songs starting with letters after that don't have the MM symbol and are not mixable.

I also have two albums from the band Keane. In this case, all the songs from one album have the MM symbol, and all the songs from the other do not.

If I put the full path of the first unmixable Ash song into the webpage for the MusicIP Mixer and click the Status button it gives a status of 1 = mixable. That's consistent with what the MusicIP Mixer GUI itself says: all these songs from both albums for both bands are mixable - and via the MusicIP GUI I get a mix from any of these songs.

I searched a few threads here and tried a few things: upgraded to the latest release of both Slimserver and MusicIP, refreshed my MusicIP cache via the http://localhost:10002 page, deleted my slimserver cache db and rebuilt it, re-Archived the analysis for all my songs via the MusicIP GUI, cleared the Music and Playlist folders in Slimserver's server settings, set the MusicMagic Reload Interval to 0 for a while, and then to 60 for a while. But none of these has made any difference

It seems particularly peculiar to me that in both cases, about half the songs from these two artists are unmixable, but in one case alphabetically by song title, and in the other by album.

Can anyone suggest something else I can try to solve this?

Steve
__________________________________________________ ___________
SlimServer Version: 6.3.1 - 8468 - Windows 2000 - EN - cp1252
MusicIp Mixer 1.6 (Build date: Monday, June 26, 2006)

[madfuzu]

After trying numerous permutations, this seems to work every time (in case anyone else is interested):

1. In Server Settings: Enable MusicMagic, Disable iTunes
2. Stop Slimserver
3. Delete the cache db file: SlimServer/Sever/Cache/slimseversql.db
4. Start Slimserver
5. Wait for scanning to complete - library will be built from MusicMagic data only
6. In Server Settings / iTunes: specify iTunes Music Library.xml Location and iTunes Music Folder (even if the iTunes library is on same computer)
7. In Sever Settings: Enable iTunes
8. Wait .. quite a while (4000 songs worth)

Result: All music is MusicMagic mixable, all iTunes playlists appear, no music is duplicated. Perfect. No idea why it doesnt work if I follow any other method.

[kdf]

Quoting madfuzu <madfuzu.2ccg4z1155246301 (AT) no-mx (DOT) forums.slimdevices.com>:

> Result: All music is MusicMagic mixable, all iTunes playlists appear,
> no music is duplicated. Perfect. No idea why it doesnt work if I
> follow any other method.

because, as a result of all the comments over rescan times being too
long, a song is not scanned AGAIN if it is already in the database and
the timestamp doesn't show any change since the last time it was
scanned. This means when it comes to getting the musicmagic track,
the update does not happen. This is noted in the related bug report,
along with this workaround.

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3735

note: this is no longer an issue in 6.5
-kdf

[madfuzu]

Thanks KDF. I think I've found an issue that 6.5 won't fix - and worth therefore highlighting for the benefit of others with high hopes.

... on further investigation, I found that although I don't have duplicated songs, I do have some artists duplicated ...

For these artists, some songs were mixable, and some were not - and the artist was appearing twice: once for the mixable songs, and a second time for the non-mixable (not sure why mixability would make Slimserver treat the songs as being for different artists).

Anyway, I found the cause. The non-mixable songs were coming from iTunes. The mixables from MusicMagic. The reason they weren't all coming from MusicMagic? Well it seems that the headless server doesnt maintain itself in sync with the MusicMagic mixer application - when you load music via the application, the server doesnt know about it unless you manually force it to reload (and I cant find a way to do that reliably, or automatically). It has a refresh parameter in mmm.ini, but it doesnt seem to have a watch list like the application to tell it to look for more songs, and it doesnt seem to respect the GUI application's settings for these kinds of things.

My solution? Stop the MusicMagic (headless) service and turn it off (disable it, and unlink it from the slimserver service). And in its place turn on the API support in the MusicMagic application (which does have a watch list, and of course knows about the songs you add to it via the GUI). Then what you see in MusicMagic GUI will match what you see in slimserver: because slimserver is getting its info from the MusicMagic application instead of from the headless server.

My misunderstanding: I assumed that the headless server would somehow share all its information with the GUI application. Whist it may share some information, it obviously does not share enough to guarantee that when Slimserver queries the API from headless server it will receive the same info as when it queries the API from the application.

I guess for some people permanently running the application might be an issue: for me, not, because I was leaving the MusicMagic application running on the Win2K server I user for slimserver most of the time anyway. So turning the server off and relying on just the application is no big deal.

I guess this is a MusicMagic issue really, not a slimserver issue - just posting here for the benefit of anyone else struggling to get the two working reliably together.

I have to say, by the way, in case there's anyone out there wondering, I think its dead cool that the folks behind these two apps have decided to work together to provide the MusicMagic features via slimserver. Two very cool apps that I very much enjoy using, and without which most of my music collection would be very much more neglected.

Steve