New directories are not added

Timpie

Re: Can not add folder to strawberry collection

Found this old issue to which i relate my findings. The collection folder is based on an
iTunes structure (/iTunes/Music/Artist/Album) and defined as /media/d/Data/iTunes/Music
I have found multiple times that adding a new artist under the Music Folder that it is not picked up by
the 'Update Changed Collection Folder' or even 'Full Collection Scan' ... if however I put the new 7
songs under an already existing artist it IS picked up.
Tried restarting after adding new songs or even putting media files directly under the Music folder,
nothing makes a difference

Adding a directory from the Playlist menu only adds it to the playlist (no ratings possible)

I wonder how anyone out there adds new songs?

jonas

@Timpie
How many folders do you have in your music collection?
If this is on Linux, you could have run out of watch descriptors. The default is 65536.

cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

PunkRockJW

I've encountered this same issue and while I don't have a good solution, I do have a solution that will work. Adding "albums" to an existing "artist" folder works great but when I need to add a new "artist" folder at the top level of my library, it does not get picked up.

The solution I've found is to close the application, delete the strawberry profile data, relaunch, and reconfigure the application. Historically I've deleted ~/.var/app/org.strawberrymusicplayer.strawberry completely but you can probably cut a few steps out and only delete the "data' subdirectory.

This isn't a great solution but it does work. One of these days I may try to figure out if I can find logs of the scanning process (if they even exist) but for now this gets the job done.

jonas

@PunkRockJW
I tested this on both Linux, macOS and Windows, unable to reproduce the issue.
What OS is it?

PunkRockJW

I'm currently on Linux Mint 21.1 but I've had it happen on several earlier version of Mint as well.
Interestingly enough, I had this same issue when I was using Clementine earlier in the year before switching over to Strawberry.
My library is held on an external disk and originally I thought it had something to do with that or some sort of weird file system permissions but no matter what I did, the issue persisted. The only thing I could figure out was to blow away the library database and start fresh.
I have a few ideas of reorganizing the library structure so I don't have over 1,400 directories in the top level but that will take time I don't feel like spending.
Is there any way to log the directory scanning process so I can try to chase this down?

Jormungandr89

I also experience this issue on Arch Linux. The library scan will detect new albums in existing artist folders but not new artist folders.

My general fix is the same as the other user mentioned -- deleting the Strawberry database and then rebuilding the library. However, this is suboptimal because I lose play counts etc. and the it takes a long time to rescan the library. My files are on an NFS share. In <share>/music, there are ~770 artist folders, with varying amounts of subfolders.

I tried running Strawberry from terminal with verbose flags, doing a full collection scan, and dumping the output to a file (which ended up quite large). When I searched the file, there weren't any entries for the new artist folders that weren't getting added -- meaning, there were not any errors produced by the scanner for those files. Additionally, once I've deleted the database and performed a rescan, the files are then added correctly and function correctly, so I don't believe that the files are an issue.

I've had to do this workaround a number of times to get new artists added, so I went looking for some troubleshooting or a fix. When I had the files stored on a local drive rather than NFS, I did not encounter this issue. There were a few less artist folders at that time, but still in excess of 725 or so.

jonas

A full re-scan should iterate all files and directories, except hidden files and directories. When new directories are found it should immediately find songs in those directories.
So even if you ran out of watch descriptors, a full re-scan should find the songs, even though the "monitor collection" feature won't fully work, ie.: will not find songs in a all directories.
So this sounds to me like a Strawberry bug, unfortunately, it's probably not something I'd be able to fix without debugging in an environment where the problem occurs.
I suggest to open a bug report about this on GitHub (https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry/issues) with as much details as possible, OS, filesystem, audio filetype, how the directory hierarchy looks like, i.e.: (Music / Artist / Album), etc.
Someone else should debug this, shouldn't be too hard to fix if you can reproduce the problem on a full scan with adding a new artist dir.
Here is a place to start, this is where it finds new directories:
https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry/blob/dd72fb4ca590062cfe886c88ad098adc91deb161/src/collection/collectionwatcher.cpp#L463
Here is where it iterates the new found subdirs:
https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry/blob/dd72fb4ca590062cfe886c88ad098adc91deb161/src/collection/collectionwatcher.cpp#L698
It will probably be easiest to try and debug this by moving a new artist directory in and out from the music directory, instead of a full re-scan, since a full scan will take long and iterate all subdirs in the music dir.