[Pkg-audacious-maintainers] Bug#602784: audacious: ** WARNING **: Could not open 'Foo - Foobar', no transport plugin available.

[A. Costa]

Apologies for my being late in replying (post-bug closing); certain
difficult and necessary family duties took priority.  Appearing as
though to be publicly ignoring a maintainer's useful diagnostic
questions isn't what most bug reporters set out to do.  Onward...

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 13:05:25 -0500
John Lindgren <john.lindgren at tds.net> wrote:

> What is the full path of the file you are trying to play, and how are
> you communicating that path to Audacious?...

> ...Which of these two options {command line 'pwd' file name
> invocation, or full path} are you trying to do?

After those questions, I couldn't reproduce the bug, except from a
playlist.  Examining the playlist where the song title occurred, it
turned out the playlist was corrupt -- no garbage lines, but the
occasional missing line or two.  Maybe 'audacious' did that, or perhaps
it was some restart or other crash that prevented Linux from
writing a file buffer (with playlist data) to disk in time.  The latter
seems most likely.

Brings up another issue, which is that since users tend to keep
playlist files open a lot, (and modify them a lot), and these files can
get pretty long, then playlist files must tend to be fragile
crash-sensitive things.  (My playlist files become "expensive"
since I tweak 'em a lot.  My method is stick a few thousand or so in
file, randomize, then tweak the random sort as I go, to improve the song
contrasts.  Many dinners have background music.)

Given fragile playlists, some kind of consistency preserving atomic
write would be good, preferably journaled.  Since such a feature would
be generally useful, the best thing might be a special library or utils
to get in between media players and the file system, whenever the
players need to modify a playlist.  Such a hypothetical util could solve
the fragility problem for every media player.

HTH...