Mixxx

Provide meaningful error messages when Mixxx fails to lookup MusicBrainz metadata

Bug #1184158 reported by jus on 2013-05-25

This bug affects 2 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Mixxx	Fix Released	Medium	Max Linke	Mixxx 2.0.0 "1.12.0"

Bug Description

Tested with lp:trunk

Currently Mixxx always trows a "Sorry. Mixxx could not find this song" message.

There is no distinction between:
A) no matching metadata for the selected track available @MusicBrainz
b) no connection to the MusicBrainz servers (User offline, connection blocked, host down, etc.)

See original description

Tags:

jus (jus) on 2013-05-25

description:	updated
description:	updated

Daniel Schürmann (daschuer) on 2013-05-25

Changed in mixxx:
importance:	Undecided → Medium
status:	New → Confirmed

Max Linke (max-linke) on 2013-05-26

Changed in mixxx:
milestone:	none → 1.12.0
assignee:	nobody → Max Linke (max-linke)

Revision history for this message

Max Linke (max-linke) wrote on 2013-05-26:

musicbrainzNetworkError.patch Edit (9.1 KiB, text/plain)

This patch will load a network error page if one of the HTTP requests fails. Otherwise the old error message is shown

Max Linke (max-linke) on 2013-05-30

Changed in mixxx:
status:	Confirmed → In Progress

Revision history for this message

jus (jus) wrote on 2013-06-16:

Thanks Max, tried your patch.
Some comments:

The new network error page says:
"Sorry
Mixx can't connect to the internet
HTTP status: 0"

* "Error" should replace the word "Sorry"
We should emphasize that there an error, no need to apologize
* Because thee patch does not differentiate between host down ("The server is not responding or is not reachable") and no internet connection ("The Internet connection appears to be offline"), we should at least specify the problem and provide some tips as to how the problem may be solved.

* Drop the "HTTP status" bit if it can't provide extra information to the person who is troubleshooting. Is there even a status 0? Not listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

* The translatable strings in the *.ui files contain unwanted HTML blobs. We generally try to get rid of them ( lp:954234 ), at least we should not introduce new ones. A translator is currently presented a text in the form of

<html><head/><body><p align="center">Mixxx can't connect to the internet</p></body></html>

This often leads to translation errors, or even untranslated strings. Using unambiguous strings is the foundation for having strings translated.

It may seem a bit too much noise for such a simple simple error message, but let's not forget that devs knows a product in much more detail then the average user, who is the addressee of the message.

Revision history for this message

Max Linke (max-linke) wrote on 2013-06-16:

I only tried the error messages when I disconnected my internet. Then Qt gives me 0 as a HTTP Error. I guess that is their code for 'no connection'. I'll see if I can test this more and update the patch then, I would in general like to keep the HTTP status when I can use it to distinguish between host down and no internet connection.

I'll also check the ui file again to remove the HTML blobs

Revision history for this message

Max Linke (max-linke) wrote on 2013-06-23:

https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/pull/19

jus (jus) on 2013-06-28