Yet another strange behaviour of the sync process

Dear all,
Let me tell you this simple story:

  • After I added several new folders into my network volume, AS starts the sync process.
  • This ended up in an unique album containing several disks (Complete recordings of Martha Argerich).
  • Later on (Days after) I added other folders and the sync process started: This ended up with the complete recordings of Martha being split into 2 albums without any change into the folders that contained those disks.
  • I manually restarted the Sync process but to no avail.
  • I slightly modified the folder name containing the disks from Martha, the sync process started and at the end I’m finally back to the starting point: only one album with several disks.

How is it that initially the Sync process ended up into one album, then in two albums with a few tracks from a few disks being separated (see attached picture), and after a restart of the Sync process we are back to normal.
No change of the tags was performed in between.

Same issue I have.
When resynching some albums that initially imported correctly suddenly split up…

Yes, apparently, that’s the very same problem.
Yet another case this morning where after a resync due to the import of new disks. Suddenly, one collection was split into 2 parts with the second one made of … only 1 track!!!
There is something bad in the realm of the sync algorithm !!

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Yes. Yes. Yes.

I gave this happen every-now-and-then.

  1. I remove said music folder from source. (put it temporarily on desktop.
  2. Delete from AO
  3. Delete deleted files.
  4. Close and reopen AO
  5. Add folder from desktop to sync folder.
  6. Usually the problem is corrected.

Regards

Phil

You’re right, that’s a good approach to kill the issue, but this is putting the determinism of the sync algorithm into question: why is it that for the very same set of folders/files we get different and inpredictable results?
Why is it that without any change to the metadata, we can get different results? Why if we restart manually the sync process, usually we get no change to the previous situation (a split stays where it was before); and when we trigger a sync by sligthly changing the folder name for example, things go back to normal?

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And this what happened just a few minutes ago:

  • The collection of disks was split into two albums: one containing the majority of disks/tracks, the second one only containing track 14 of disk 47
  • I slightly changed the folder name of disk 47 (Replacing a letter by another one)
  • And bang! Things are back to where they should be: only one album for the entire collection.

That’s weird!

And I can tell you, this was not due to that particular folder, as the other tracks from that folder were treated normally, and the split already occured with other disks/tracks.

It’s a pity that there is no log in the Mac version, I would be curious to understand the behaviour of the sync algorithm on that particular case.

2 Likes

Just a complement to this: after the first change of folder name of Disk 47, and contrary to what I wrote in the previous post, things were not back to normal:
==> All tracks from disk 47 were treated as a separated album.

So, I changed again the directory name and a resync was triggered and then…
==> All disks/tracks were back to the same album.

I have difficulties to figure out what happened with the Sync process…

2 Likes

Yes I don’t understand what’s going on…
I have to

  • close AS
  • remove the albums that mess up from the library from the watched folder
  • start AS
  • do a resync
  • close AS
  • add the albums back to the watched folder
  • start AS
  • do a resync
    and then suddenly everything is okay.

But the next time I add an album to the folder and do a resync it can happen again.
So this is extremely frustrating, especially when you have over 10000 albums, as I simply can’t browse all of them every time to check if they stayed in one piece.

It looks like AS is having difficulties with albums that were already “synched” before.
I haven’t seen this bug happening for newly added albums (but not sure if this is the case all the time).

Hi @MQA_Tester

It looks like there is an issue with a file in that album. That is my experience. Have a look at the files and see if there a y anomalies.

Regards

Phil

Hi Phil,
There’s certainly an issue somewhere, but where and what kind an issue is this? Without a log, hard to say.
What is really really weird is that things go back to normal after several resync. If the problem lies in a problem with file naming or so, it could not be fixed by just a resync.
I had some very very strange problems long time ago with the Sync algorithm and finally identify the problem as something related to the wrong use of accentued chars (wrong encoding in UTF-8) that was due to the use of different platforms (Mac, Linux, and others).
Since that, I always ensure that all file names are properly encoded using UTF-8 on Mac.

But, as I encounter the very same problem as others, it’s probably not linked to that.

something related to the wrong use of accentued chars (wrong encoding in UTF-8)

Yes. That is possibly an issue… that I also gad.

Mysterious.

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