No Error Messages when Server Uncontactable

[clubsoda]

Binary package hint: picard

Having tried Picard a few times and never scored a hit, I thought the fingerprinting algorithm must be rubbish. What I didn't know was that my queries were not reaching the MusicBrainz server. No error messages ever popped up and the "Log" window was perfectly blank. Occasionally the bottom status bar would flash up "No matching tracks for file xyz.mp3" for a few milliseconds... another miss!

Failure to reach the server could be for any number of reasons:-
- no MusicBrainz account
- login details not entered into the options panel
- typo' in login details
- firewall, proxy or other network blockage
- incorrect server address or address format
- temporary MusicBrainz server outage.

People who haven't used Picard before are unlikely to have accounts at MusicBrainz, so that's probably surprised quite a few newbies. :)
A couple of error messages to cover these situations would really help.

[Picard 0.9.0-2 on Xubuntu Hardy]

[Philipp Wolfer (phw)]

One thing that was fixed upstream are missing or incorrect login details. If the user fails to login on actions that require a MusicBrainz login Picard will show a login dialog. This will be in the next release.

See http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~musicbrainz-developers/picard/trunk/revision/823

[clubsoda (clubsoda)]

For me, this will be a good reason to upgrade when the time comes.
Thanks.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for reporting this bug. I am confirming it based on the comments above that this will be fixed in the next release.

[Leo Arias (elopio)]

Hello clubsoda,

Is this still a bug with the current version of picard?

[clubsoda (clubsoda)]

Thanks for following up.

Yes, this is still a bug on Maverick with 2.6.35-24-generic and picard 0.12.1-0ubuntu1.

I haven't seen the login dialog mentioned by Philipp above, although it could be that MusicBrainz no longer demands login details(?) Either that or I have a cookie hidden somewhere on my machine, because incorrect login details aren't triggering the issue for me any more.

However, if the server address is incorrect, the lookup fails without explanation. The behaviour of the program in the case of a network communication failure seems indistinguishable from its behaviour when a song "fingerprint" can't be matched in the database. Needless to say that's a recipe for confusion and frustration.

I admit there are messages flashing past on the status bar. One approach would be to have those echoed to the log window, which is accessible through the help menu. Some kind of attention grabbing alert that the server is not responding would be even better.

Regards.

[Chad Wilson (chad-wilson)]

Messages echoed to the status bar do get logged; but only in debug mode I believe; otherwise there's too much generated and they're all stored in memory in a pretty simplistic fashion so presents memory issues while tagging large libraries.

FWIW, as of Picard 0.14 the network request layer was rewritten to properly handle request timeouts and be able to log them, rather than have Picard hang; which will help with one aspect of this.

As of Picard 0.16, web request failures are now echoed to the log at a higher level; as opposed to the debug level they were before, so should be visible to all users.

It's still a bit primitive, but better than before, and maybe sufficient to finally close this in preference for some more specific suggestions on enhancing the reporting/notification of errors to users; preferably reported and discussed upstream.