Right now I am poised on a knife edge between deciding my conversation with CS is over and sending a really snotty reply. The last several turns have seen me sending them increasingly detailed bug reports. I spent two hours yesterday testing various scenarios with the DLM to isolate the causes/circumstances of the crashes. I told them that their prior advice had not been relevant, that the information I needed for complete uninstallation had been given me by someone on a board (this one) not by them, that after about six or seven uninstall/reinstall sessions I had been able to establish that as long as I used Firefox and a clean installation, the DLM worked, but that it still crashes as soon as it is asked to redownload any previously failed download (which obviously does not go together real well with their current download policy). I gave them detailed step by step accounts, including how I had tried various browsers, download locations, and other variables, and I asked them to read the detail rather than hitting paste. I explained in detail how the problem is with track transitions during full album downloads.
What do I get back? Another email suggesting I check that I am downloading to the emusic folder on the desktop (apparently even they believe that their DLM can't handle changing folder) and that I test the DLM on a free track. Moronic advice in the circumstances - maybe OK for a first pass, but on the 12th conversational turn after a long and detailed explanation of the problem that already excludes these "solutions"??? Nothing in their reply that suggests any interest in what is actually wrong, just a pat on the head for the poor confused user who must really just not be able to find a folder on their computer, because it couldn't possibly be that the software is actually unreliable. I give up. It's too frustrating trying to get them to engage in anything resembling communication.
Hell, I just had a rant on the emu forum after finding, yet again, another track that was cut-off at the end that had escaped my previous notice.
I am not looking forward to yet another CS trade of emails.
Nothing in their reply that suggests any interest in what is actually wrong, just a pat on the head for the poor confused user who must really just not be able to find a folder on their computer, because it couldn't possibly be that the software is actually unreliable. I give up. It's too frustrating trying to get them to engage in anything resembling communication.
Well, to be fair, that sort of thing isn't unusual for a phone-based tech support operation.
From a programmer's perspective, it's interesting that it fails during the transition from one file to the next... Technically what's happening with Firefox is that you're downloading a file of type "application/vnd.emusic-emusic_list," which I believe is just a text file with an .emp extension. The DLM is the handler for those (though you can change that yourself if you want to), and mostly what it does is read the list of MP3 files to be downloaded, and download them whilst showing you a nice progress meter for each one, etc. etc. At the end of each file, it has to commit and then release the file handle - and when a program can't do that, it's usually because of user/folder permissions. But the fact that it happens only on retries seems to suggest that it's something else.
Sooo, as for other possibilites... the DLM is based on XULRunner, which is what Firefox itself runs on, and if there are other apps on the machine that also use XULRunner they could be interfering in some way or causing some sort of incompatibility, particularly if the other app was ill-behaved and put its copy of XULRunner on the Windows PATH (which we all remember from the MS-DOS days, right?). Unfortunately lots of online apps use XULRunner, and they aren't all kept up-to-date very well - DLM is actually better than most in that regard. You could search your hard drive for other copies of XULRunner.exe or XUL.dll, just to see if there are any.
Other than that, have you tried eMusic/J yet? That's not based on XULRunner at all, AFAIK, I think it's just a regular Java application. You need the Java runtimes, but pretty much everybody has those... I guess in theory, someone (like me!) could write an alternative to the DLM that would just be a traditional Windows "native" executable, with as few dependencies as possible - I'll bet that would work a lot more consistently. Or at least the app's author could write it specifically so that it doesn't get stuck in a loop when it's trying to re-download a failed file from earlier on.
Thanks, Scissorman - you should be getting paid out of my downloads. There are two copies of xul.dll - one for the DLM, one for firefox. The DLM also as an wulutil.dll. I ran a search for XULRunner.exe and the emusic copy seems to be the only one - but the search also turned up a massive string of folders called "AppHang_xulrunner.exe_[long strong of numbers]" from a few different windows folders called "WER" (but in several locations) - Windows Error Reporting?? - and each folder contains a "Report.wer" file. I know nothing about this, but my ignorant guess is that this is a list of logs of when xulrunner.exe crashed?
The folder permissions line of thought is tempting because the error message that the DLM keeps generating keeps getting read by customer service as evidence that I am trying to download to the wrong folder. But (1) I have been reduced to only downloading to the default My eMusic folder on the desktop, and (2) the DLM is able to successfully download whole albums to that folder before getting stuck again, so I am at a loss to see what I could be doing wrong with folder permissions.
(I do plan to try emusic/j - there's just a bloody-minded part of me that is reluctant to just give up on trying to make the DLM work/persuade emusic to make it work.)
Well this is hilarious. After calming down I sent another response to emusic CS explaining why their latest suggestions were beside the point and that the crashes were still happening as described. Latest response: they suggest I use emusic/J instead, and tell me where to download it!!!! What's even funnier is they warn me that they "cannot support it", when the whole conversation indicates that they cannot actually support their own DLM either - if telling the user to download to the desktop and try pausing and restarting the downloads doesn't get it done, they capitulate.
The only support you'll need with emusic/J is someone to keep you from falling on the floor giggling as you watch it flawlessly download track after track. Seriously, when it first came out a bunch of us were banging on it trying to break it (there was no restriction on re-downloading then). I went so far as to yank the plug on my computer while it was downloading. When I started it again it just picked up where it was before. When I lost thousands of tracks due to a bad disk controller, I just started clicking album downloads. I would have hundreds of tracks queued at a time and never a problem.
Well, since even emusic CS is telling me that emusic/J is better than their own software, I finally installed it. As expected, it works great so far. I still feel annoyed that emusic is unwilling to show any interest in why its own DLM is not working reliably for some. One might think that with the centrality of pain-free downloading to their business chances there would be some interest in actually asking for some information about a consistently replicable crash. Even if it's a conflict specific to certain users' configurations. Instead they just shrug. (And show no evidence that their CS staff actually know much about the DLM)
Honestly, they should just open source the DLM; way back in the mists of time they were core to the FreeAmp project (renamed Zinf after support was pulled). Maybe my freetard boxers are showing but I think it would be a more sustainable model to just hand that over to the community, especially since they have demonstrated poor stewardship and support.
/edit
Turns out it is open sourced but you'll likely need to fork it.
I agree, except that that path seems to presuppose a reservoir of community good will and investment in the overall project, and emusic's recent behavior and image makeover don't seem to have been calculated to produce that.
Well, to be fair (I know, I know), the existence of eMusic/J might also act as an excuse for them not to further improve their own DLM. Though I personally believe it's more like the usual reason - they hired the people who built the DLM on a project basis, and when they delivered it, they didn't want to keep paying them for ongoing maintenance. Other companies actually hire people on temporary or even a full-time basis, but then the people they hire leave for better jobs and they leave behind code-bases that are highly idiosyncratic and nearly impossible to support.
The eMu folks might have even decided to develop their API because of a bad experience of that nature - they might have thought they could actually crowdsource their software development completely. It's not unusual for people to make design decisions based on personnel issues, especially when they have no software-development background but are in the software business anyway (because it's a critical part of their business model). And who knows, the API might still pay off somewhere down the road (though I doubt it).
I have had similar experiences with Mordac the few times I bother to contact them about anything other than refunds of credits.
Based on my experience the problems tend to be in the vagaries of Bill Gates little project. There are so many variations in the various iterations of Windoze that I'm guessing that they have to program the download mangler to accommodate some nonexistent 2.5 kids and a dog version of typicality that when you get too far removed from their hallucinated version of reality the gremlins are unleashed on those unfortunate enough to be their customers.
I take Doofy's point. The current owners are only there to make money on the sell-off. They may well be taking a medium term view - 10 years or more - to realise their profits. But the end point is that they will want to get out at some stage. So they will not want to expend a large sum on replacing the download manager when the new owner may already have one that works really well (Amazon, itunes??) Somewhere emusic must have a business model and I suspect replacing the downloader manager is not part of it. But why don't they just buy out emusic/j? That is what I suspect itunes would do. And to take Doofy's point further - you might build an annex if you thought it would put you in a more profitable market sector, but I agree you arte unlikley to make major repairs if there will be no subsequent increase in sale price.
I don't think the music download business has another 10 years of life in it. My son is 20. He's got plenty of tracks on his computer, but I notice he plays a lot of music on YouTube. He just lets the video run, covered up by whatever he's currently doing. The waste of bandwidth to deliver video that nobody's watching makes a part of me twitch. No doubt it's because when I started you got 110 characters a second, assuming you could get through to a dial-up connection. I've argued in favor of downloads for years, but a full hard drive has changed my perspective. Most of what I'm listening to these days is piped in from the cloud. Given that I purposely avoid more than a few listens to the same album, and that I'll never get through all the stuff I want to hear even if I only play each album once (damn musicians crank it out faster than I can play it, had a half-century head start on me to boot) it is making less and less sense to me to download anything.
I'm beginning to see that point. I've been going through itunes on my computer finding albums that I have downloaded and played once. I've bought these yet I could have heard then for free on spotify, as long a s I don't mind the odd advert. In my youth I used to listen to radio a lot - I often couldn't afford to buy the music I wanted. Spotify is a similar experience except you choose what you are listening to. I suspect though that I am at an age when I'll continue downloading and buying the odd CD. Even 10 years ago if someone had told me that instead of buying CDs I'd be downloading the amount of music that I am now doing, I would have thought they were mad. So who knows what it will be like in then years time? (OK I accept someone probably does have an idea!)
Given that I purposely avoid more than a few listens to the same album, and that I'll never get through all the stuff I want to hear even if I only play each album once
For me that's held in tension with the opposite impulse - that only those albums that sustain repeated listens and continue to yield texture after repeated listens are in the end really worth cultivating a relationship with, so I really only use streaming as an initial filter to narrow the search. This does create an ongoing tension between the increasing amounts of available music and the possibility of investing time in really listening to it thoroughly. My 'solution' for now is a concertina motion - expand (go through phases of getting a bunch of new stuff) and contract (sift it and home in for some serious listening to the most worthwhile catches.) Not easy to sustain in the present environment, though.
Using an English phrase 'I'm making hay while the sun shines' with emusic. With some really good deals for emusic over here, I'm trying to fill lots of gaps in my collection. For February and March I have 275 downloads per month at an average price of about 15p per track. From April to August I get 225 downloads working out at an average of 16p per track. After August I go back to my grandfathered plan 100 tracks for £19.99 per month. But that will not last when we get the majors. If emusic rises in price a lot I'll leave, play what I've got, use Spotify and buy a few key albums from places like Amazon and 7-digital.
@greg: We use that expression on this side of the pond as well. However, I suspect the majority of the population have only a vague concept of what hay is, let alone how one would go about making it, or why one does so when the sun is shining.
No doubt it's because when I started you got 110 characters a second, assuming you could get through to a dial-up connection.
haha, hadn't thought of my top-of-the-line 19.2 modem for years!
I've argued in favor of downloads for years, but a full hard drive has changed my perspective.
I'm tired of buying bigger drives and then needing to back THEM up.
The eMu downloader I'm using has started behaving properly again. For a while, I could only DL one track at a time. It still has to be one track at at time since I'm no longer a subscriber, but before, I literally had to wait until the 1st DL finished before clicking on another. Now I can get them queued up again, for some reason.
Having grown up in the country, I am familiar with hay and where it comes from. I have even had the pleasure of riding on top of a wagon load of rectangular bales and watching them be lifted up into the barn loft with the old pulley and tongs system. I can smell it now - the dry, dusty smell, but not an unpleasant one.
Well, there's one word that explains why you have to make hay while the sun shines, and that's "mold." It can actually kill livestock if they eat enough of it.
I've hated hay ever since I got infested with seed ticks from jumping into a bunch of it off the loft in my aunt's barn. I'm not one of those gals that screeches at bugs, but ticks make my skin crawl.
I do like seeing the round bales in a field, rather than the square ones. Far, far away from the ticks, they look lovely, sitting there.
I like the look of the round bales better too. They could be unnerving if you'd been playing Katamari Damancy, though. People have been killed by bales that roll off out of control. They can weigh a ton. Warning: Do not taunt Happy Fun Bale.
Comments
What do I get back? Another email suggesting I check that I am downloading to the emusic folder on the desktop (apparently even they believe that their DLM can't handle changing folder) and that I test the DLM on a free track. Moronic advice in the circumstances - maybe OK for a first pass, but on the 12th conversational turn after a long and detailed explanation of the problem that already excludes these "solutions"??? Nothing in their reply that suggests any interest in what is actually wrong, just a pat on the head for the poor confused user who must really just not be able to find a folder on their computer, because it couldn't possibly be that the software is actually unreliable. I give up. It's too frustrating trying to get them to engage in anything resembling communication.
/emission of steam from ears.
Hell, I just had a rant on the emu forum after finding, yet again, another track that was cut-off at the end that had escaped my previous notice.
I am not looking forward to yet another CS trade of emails.
From a programmer's perspective, it's interesting that it fails during the transition from one file to the next... Technically what's happening with Firefox is that you're downloading a file of type "application/vnd.emusic-emusic_list," which I believe is just a text file with an .emp extension. The DLM is the handler for those (though you can change that yourself if you want to), and mostly what it does is read the list of MP3 files to be downloaded, and download them whilst showing you a nice progress meter for each one, etc. etc. At the end of each file, it has to commit and then release the file handle - and when a program can't do that, it's usually because of user/folder permissions. But the fact that it happens only on retries seems to suggest that it's something else.
Sooo, as for other possibilites... the DLM is based on XULRunner, which is what Firefox itself runs on, and if there are other apps on the machine that also use XULRunner they could be interfering in some way or causing some sort of incompatibility, particularly if the other app was ill-behaved and put its copy of XULRunner on the Windows PATH (which we all remember from the MS-DOS days, right?). Unfortunately lots of online apps use XULRunner, and they aren't all kept up-to-date very well - DLM is actually better than most in that regard. You could search your hard drive for other copies of XULRunner.exe or XUL.dll, just to see if there are any.
Other than that, have you tried eMusic/J yet? That's not based on XULRunner at all, AFAIK, I think it's just a regular Java application. You need the Java runtimes, but pretty much everybody has those... I guess in theory, someone (like me!) could write an alternative to the DLM that would just be a traditional Windows "native" executable, with as few dependencies as possible - I'll bet that would work a lot more consistently. Or at least the app's author could write it specifically so that it doesn't get stuck in a loop when it's trying to re-download a failed file from earlier on.
The folder permissions line of thought is tempting because the error message that the DLM keeps generating keeps getting read by customer service as evidence that I am trying to download to the wrong folder. But (1) I have been reduced to only downloading to the default My eMusic folder on the desktop, and (2) the DLM is able to successfully download whole albums to that folder before getting stuck again, so I am at a loss to see what I could be doing wrong with folder permissions.
(I do plan to try emusic/j - there's just a bloody-minded part of me that is reluctant to just give up on trying to make the DLM work/persuade emusic to make it work.)
/edit
Turns out it is open sourced but you'll likely need to fork it.
The eMu folks might have even decided to develop their API because of a bad experience of that nature - they might have thought they could actually crowdsource their software development completely. It's not unusual for people to make design decisions based on personnel issues, especially when they have no software-development background but are in the software business anyway (because it's a critical part of their business model). And who knows, the API might still pay off somewhere down the road (though I doubt it).
Although I guess they did just put a new annex on this particular McMansion, so what do I know?
I have had similar experiences with Mordac the few times I bother to contact them about anything other than refunds of credits.
Based on my experience the problems tend to be in the vagaries of Bill Gates little project. There are so many variations in the various iterations of Windoze that I'm guessing that they have to program the download mangler to accommodate some nonexistent 2.5 kids and a dog version of typicality that when you get too far removed from their hallucinated version of reality the gremlins are unleashed on those unfortunate enough to be their customers.
What the hell is he talking about?
Forget about fiddling with the download mangler and spend your time fiddling with the windoze settings and ecentricities.
haha, hadn't thought of my top-of-the-line 19.2 modem for years!
I've argued in favor of downloads for years, but a full hard drive has changed my perspective.
I'm tired of buying bigger drives and then needing to back THEM up.
The eMu downloader I'm using has started behaving properly again. For a while, I could only DL one track at a time. It still has to be one track at at time since I'm no longer a subscriber, but before, I literally had to wait until the 1st DL finished before clicking on another. Now I can get them queued up again, for some reason.
I do like seeing the round bales in a field, rather than the square ones. Far, far away from the ticks, they look lovely, sitting there.
Misty morning walk by stigc, on Flickr