Cowbell is unstable and generally non working

[MartinP]

Cowbell music organizer doesn't work for me at all.

Guessing track information crashes the application - it's still alive (repaints window) but does not react to any user input.

When manually editing track informations and then selecting "Save" it crashes most of the time and takes ridicuosly long if it succeeds - something like 30 seconds to tag 10 sound files, on a 2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine.

Also it doesn't start when there is a "~/.cowbell" - it creates one everytime you start it, but if it exists, it fails to start. It doesn't bring up a window and just blocks. strace reveals it stops doing anything after accessing said file.

Is this the expected behaviour? I mean, is it just so alpha that it doesn't work most of the time or is this a "real" bug?

[Brad Taylor (brad)]

I'm not quite sure why you're having so many problems -- I have cowbell successfully working on a 1 GHz laptop with 512 MB RAM. Cowbell is a fairly stable project that has been in development for over a year so I'm very surprised. Can you run cowbell with the --debug flag, do some operation, and paste the output here? Also what is your current configuration (mono version, gtk# version, gtk version, cowbell version, etc).

[MartinP (mail-martin-probst)]

Ok, here it comes:

=== Versions ===

martin@orpheus:~$ mono -V
Mono JIT compiler version 1.1.8.3, (C) 2002-2005 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com
        TLS: __thread
        GC: Included Boehm (with typed GC)
        SIGSEGV : normal
        Globalization: normal

Package: gtk-sharp2
Version: 1.9.5-0ubuntu1~5.04ubp1

Package: libgtk2.0-0
Version: 2.8.6-0ubuntu2

Package: cowbell
Version: 0.2.4-1ubuntu1

Package: libtagc0
Version: 1.3.1-1.1ubuntu1

Package: libtag1c2
Version: 1.3.1-1.1ubuntu1

=== Debug ===

Sadly, running with --debug doesn't say anything special. Except that the program stalls exactly when (or directly after) accessing the ~/.cowbell file, both on startup and on exit. E.g. when I close the window it says "Saving preferences to /home/martin/.cowbell", it creates the file, but then nothing happens.

When "Guessing songnames", nothing happens, too, no printout on the console. A dialog pops up, but the bar doesn't move at all.

martin@orpheus:~$ cowbell --debug
Debug mode enabled.
Loading preferences file from ~/.cowbell

( ... and nothing happens after that )

martin@orpheus:~$ rm /home/martin/.cowbell
martin@orpheus:~$ cowbell --debug
Debug mode enabled.
Loading preferences file from ~/.cowbell
Loading preferences failed
Could not find file "/home/martin/.cowbell".
file:///usr/share/mp3/Alben/Rock/Some%20Album
GlobalDataModified called with song:
       Title:
      Artist: Faith No More
       Album: The Real Thing
       Genre: Rock
 TrackNumber: 0
        Year: 1989
     Comment:

(after clicking "Guess song information". I do have write permissions on that folder btw.)

The dialog is unresponsive, and clicking "Close" doesn't do anything.

If I just run Cowbell and directly exit it again, it stalls too on saving the preferences.

Maybe this is some weird race condition? This is a P-IV with Hyperthreading and an SMP kernel.

[Brad Taylor (brad)]

Do you happen to have your home directory mounted on a NFS, Samba or other remote filesystem?

[MartinP (mail-martin-probst)]

Some time has passed and Cowbell is now actually working. It's still 0.2.4 but I upgraded mono to 1.1.10. I still get weird errors from Gtk (e.g. failing assertions about tree nodes), but the Amazon part works.

Those assertion errors happen irregularily, e.g. it works between 1/3 and 2/3 of the tries, and are not reproducible. I experience similar errors in apps like Banshee, but not in other mono apps like Muine, Tomboy etc. Beats me why, but I think this can hardly be your fault, as the errors seem to happen in unmanaged Gtk code. Maybe I should file agains mono.

[MartinP (mail-martin-probst)]

I can't reproduce this anymore with newer versions of cowbell. Closing.

[Kjell Braden (afflux)]

Really closing now ;)