Bogus "base path is not found" errors causing Switch to halt

[PCPete]

I'm using Switch 2.01 to perform a folder/path conversion of around 12,000 valid PCM wave files (44.1k/16/2) to (any) format.

 

What happens is when I begin the conversion, switch prompts for the root path (in this case, since I added all the files and folders recursively under D:\My Music\) which is D:\My Music (if I add the trailing slash, or append any slash to the destination path, Switch bugs out and prepends a double backslash and fails immediately, so that's why I specify the source and destinations with no trailing slash character).

 

With "Copy Folder Structure of Source Files" switched ON, Switch randomly and repeatedly fails on valid conversions with the error :

The file d:\my music\artist\album\artist_album_track#_title.wav could not be converted because its path is not found within the base folder you specified.

 

Which of course is wrong, because I added the source files recursively from within Switch from that base path, and specified the same path in the prompt after I start the conversion off each time, and ensured that I manually removed all invalid filetypes and corrupt source files before I began each conversion.

 

This happens regardless of the encoder used, and happens completely randomly - I can set up a hundred files to convert, start it off, and it will fail on different files each time I restart it, and sometimes won't fail at all, unless I run it again on the same files, in which case it randomly fails somewhere else in the same list each time.

 

When this randomly occurs, it's usually just AFTER Switch actually performs the conversion, and the "failing file" seems to be listed twice in the source list. In other words, with the error dialog displayed, the last "completed" entry in the file list in the main window seems to be duplicated somehow and the next (all lower-cased) entry of the same name is what's highlighted.

 

I can absolutely attest and affirm that there are NO duplicates in the list each time I kick off the conversion, so I think Switch is somehow getting out of synch with itself, probably just before it opens the next entry in the source list but before the destination for the last entry has closed - this happens much more often with the destination as a networked folder.

 

I then close the dialog, delete the converted source entries and restart, and then I go through manually re-specifying the root or base folder path, and Switch carries on for another 2 or 300 or 1266 files until it gets confused again and halts the conversion again with a different file but the same error.

 

Since I'm trying to convert more than 12,000 files, this is an astonishingly painful and time-consuming process! After 2 days and 60 failures, I'm still looking at over 9,000 files still to convert and.... (Oh great, it just happened again. It got through 16 files this time! woo hoo!)

 

I've looked in the system event logs, and nothing is reported for switch. I'll retry the next operation with debugview running and see if something appears there.

 

FYI, I couldn't actually search these forums for any of the key words in the error dialog, they all are less than the minimum search length. So I apologise if this is already raised as an issue.

[PCPete]

I've now tried doing the same thing but from the other end, and it seems to be working OK.

 

What I was doing was on my X64 box, I ran Switch and selected the locally available (i.e. non-networked) music source files, and transcoded them to the remote system's filesystem via it's shared folder. I'm not sure what bits were not working correctly, but I just couldn't get more than a couple of hundred files converted without errors.

 

What I've done now, is on the remote x32 box, I'm using Switch to grab the same source files off the server's share, and convert them to the same folder that the other system was converting to but now locally, and it seems to be working just fine. I'm now into file# 3,600 or so, and there have been no errors or overwrite problems so far.

 

It IS interesting to see the amazing file-reading, list-managing, and coding performance difference between the quad-core 2.6GHz Opteron system and the 3.6GHz P4 system. I'd have to say the P4 is transcoding about 15% faster, file-by-file, but it's about 80% slower in terms of list handling and file reading. A list refresh (re-ordering about 11,600 files in the list view) takes around 13 seconds on the quadcore system, and around 75 - 130 seconds on the P4, depending on the column and data length in each column. All the file names and metadata was absolutely identical. I know some of this will be due to the different networking configurations and motherboards, but still, the actual data conversion process is pretty consistent.

 

I'm happy to try out any changes or any suggestions if that would help to improve Switch on the 64-bit platform, but for now, I have a workaround.

 

Cheers,

PCPete