Playback stops when encountering a media file with a '#' symbol in the filename

[James Lewis]

In the OTA-5 release, and prior... when the music app reaches a file which it has a problem with (eg. a FLAC file), it simply pauses at 0:00, and does not skip/continue.

Obviously it should be able to play FLAC, AAC etc. I'm not sure if this is an issue in Media Hub or the Music App.

[Andrew Hayzen (ahayzen)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

90% of my music collection is in FLAC so I find this interesting as it works for me :-)

I suspect it could be something todo with the filename instead which we have been fixing (but yet to be released to the store).

Do you mind posting the following logs to assist us debugging:
~/.cache/upstart/media-hub.log
~/.cache/upstart/mediascanner.log
~/.cache/upstart/application-click-com.ubuntu.music_music_2.1.867.log

Until then I am going to mark this bug as incomplete as we require further information.

[Jim Hodapp (jhodapp)]

This is most likely a music-app bug in this case as my understanding is that it doesn't react to the errors that QtMultimedia's MediaPlayer interface might throw. It should be able to detect an error for playback in this case and then skip over the broken file.

[Andrew Hayzen (ahayzen)]

@Jim, FYI I plan on linking the error detection signals as we are refactoring to the background+playlist support. And I suspect, or hope, this particular bug is due to something like bug 1465764.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

Here's the files requested...

I tried playing 2 files that fail, one is a .m4a the other is .flac... with a working one inbetween to make sure it had not crashed the media hub completely.

Note that there is no mediascanner.log, only .1.gz so I included that.

[Andrew Hayzen (ahayzen)]

I assume this is one of the tracks failing to play?

Failed to retrieve metadata for track 'file:///home/phablet/Music/Clementine Favourites/05. For What It's Worth (From 'Buffalo Springfield', 2Nd Version, Atco #33-200A).flac' (Problem extracting meta data for track)
(From the media-hub log)

I'm currently voting that the # in the filepath is causing similar issues to the % in bug 1465764.

@Victor what do you think?

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

That was the flac file, yes......

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

Confirmed that the "#" in the filename is the issue. However, sadly trunk isn't working either. We seem to have regressed and lp:1460916 is now plaguing the app. I'm going to reiterate again that it should NOT be music app's job to do all this URI decoding/input sanitation/etc of user filenames. It's too difficult when we have to handle calls to Thumbnailer, mediascanner-2.0, and the media-hub service all with this URL--each end point seems to handle things differently. We need a systematic solution to this that involves more than the music app playing whack-a-mole.

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

I also just wanted to state that this new bug is slightly different than lp:1460916 because lp:1460916 was related to a thumbnailer issue (that has also since regressed) and playback still worked whereas this issue is a media playback issue that must have been introduced in the media playback stack because the revision before and after the fix for lp:1460916 is also now broken.

[James Lewis (james-fsck)]

I have an open bug with Podbird which was identified as an issue with embedded album art in the podcast file being non-standard, but that filename also contains a "#", probably I should create a test case on my own webserver without the "#" to see if that is a wild goose chase, and the the problem is that simple...

[Andrew Hayzen (ahayzen)]

OK so as this has been limited to just the '#' in the filename this is a duplicate of bug 1449790, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

I'm also going to attempt to create a QML test suite to go through every possible character to check that there aren't other issues :-)