2025-02-03 Can’t run as service (and other stories)

[ProggyDave]

I’ve been using asset for a good few years now through win7, 10 and 11. All good. Used Asset in its Service mode - all good. I recently upgraded to R2025-03-03 and things have become unstuck.

As advised, I uninstalled the previous version and used the installation file from the download website for Asset. Ask went fine. Started Asset config and set up the settings to point to my music library as before. Then Asset Running mode to “Service”. This caused asset config to momentarily hang, then crash out and restart. Asset instance Disabled. Tried then changing again to service and nothing happens. Rescan, restart, refresh, detecting changes buttons do nothing. No assetservices process in task manager. Tried running under admin privileges. Same.

I theorised that maybe firewall problems (although I had changed nothing between versions of asset). Playing around with windows firewall didn’t help. Even tried using Bitdefender firewall - no difference. Is there anything I need to do to register Asset service as a windows service? I don’t believe I had to do before but I may have forgotten

So I gave up on services and went to local account. This runs fine and as expected, but when I log off/power down/log on, it seems to lose the fact that the library has been scanned. And starts rescan again. This can take a long time for 25,000 files. Not good at the start of an evening of music listening. I have disabled rescan via “Detect and catalog new tracks”. No difference.

Oh and I have tried total uninstall/reinstall a number of times.

Anyone had similar issues, or have I missed something obvious in the install (probably likely)

thanks

[Spoon]

What would crash? the configuration program, or Asset its self?

[ProggyDave]

Config.

Let me clarify.

The config program hung for a few moments when attempting to switch to service mode. The config window vanished, then shortly restarted with the asset running mode set to disabled. At no time did the Status field start to scan my files.

[Spoon]

It likely means your account you run from does not have access to the service account. Run asset config elevated or from an administrator account.

[PeterP]

Thanks for the bug report.

Until recent versions, Asset Configuration program would always run elevated. This was convenient, but caused a number of issues, such as inability to see mapped network drives.
As of current version, Asset Configuration program attempts to relaunch itself elevated when switching to service mode - sounds like this isn't working for you.
Please try launching Asset Configuration elevated (right click, 'run as administrator') then toggling service mode.

As for spurious rescans, please enable debug logging and post library logs of what it was doing - email to peter@dbpoweramp.com if they're too large for the forum.

[PeterP]

Update
Launching elevated won't help - a regression elsewhere is causing run-as-service to be non-functional in last Asset release.
Will be fixed shortly.

Please post debug logs of spurious rescans for me to investigate.

[ProggyDave]

Ok. I’ll keep an eye out for the fix. Thanks!

With the spurious rescans I had a closer look at what happens.

On starting asset config the Status field displays my library contents summary. 15703 tracks, 1412 albums. This stays visible for about 10 seconds then it leaps off onto a rescan for some reason. Files 0-15000 are dealt with in seconds. Files above 15000 take a further 20 minutes or so.

Here’s some snippets of a couple of the log files

Debug file asset-debug-asset contains not much of interest.

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] UPnP debug log opened

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] Date: 2025-03-07

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] 2025-02-03

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] Asset install location: C:\Program Files\Asset\

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] Asset data location: C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Roaming\dBpoweramp\uMediaLib rary-r8

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] Process ID: 2384

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] 1 media folders specified:

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] D:\OneDrive\music

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] No playlist folders specified

[07/03/2025 13:41:02] ContainerAddToCache: added :: 0\ [Seg: 0xA90678439B035B9D]


Debug file asset-debug-lib however does seem to contain something interesting. It goes through processing (presumably hash check) of 15000 ish audio files then hits some Audacity (audio editing tool) files

Here’s an example….


->-> [clDecoder_ffmpeg::Open]

Opening file 'D:\OneDrive\music\Transatlantic\KaLIVEoscope (Cologne)\audicityFiles_data\e00\d02\e00029c9.au' for read access: *** Error: FFmpeg error: invalid input [clDecoder_ffmpeg::SetPosition]

[07/03/2025 13:45:53] Getting tags from: D:\OneDrive\music\Transatlantic\KaLIVEoscope (Cologne)\audicityFiles_data\e00\d02\e00029cd.au

Error cannot read track meta, file must be in use.

[07/03/2025 13:45:54] Getting tags failed

TPE2OptionOverride [clDecoder_ffmpeg::Set]


I don’t believe the files were “in use”. I finished editing those files years ago. There are a lot of these temp files presumably used in the Audacity editing process. All with similar error message.


I deleted these files from my file store (no messages from windows saying files were in use) and everything appears to be ok. No more lengthy rescan. Oddly the same error message is present in the log after the deletion but this time a load of “Removing Missing Track HASH” messages are also logged shortly after.

One final point I guess might be relevant. My music file store didn’t change between upgrades of asset. Previous version seemed to cope ok with .au files.

Hope this information is useful.

[PeterP]

Thanks for the details, this is indeed most useful.

Previous versions of Asset did not recognize .au files at all, support for this format was added recently.

What happens here is that for some reason tags can't be read from these files and Asset keeps retrying tag reads on next run, incorrectly assuming that the problem is momentary. The "file in use" is Asset's generic error message for tag read errors, the problem is likely something else.

How did you generate these .au files? Can you send me one of them to look at?

You can also exclude .au from indexing in Asset configuration.

[ProggyDave]

The .au files were automatically generated when I edited the main cd audio (for some reason lost in the mists of time). From the audacity man page for the old version 2 release https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audacity_2.html it appears that the .au files are snippets of audio generated as part of their project file structure. As they are audacity project files of (probably) a proprietary format, I’m not quite sure why asset would ever want to see these to be honest, but hey I’m no expert

From their man pages, it also seems that their latest versions use a different project file structure without the .au files.

Unfortunately I deleted the .au files (I no longer needed them) and have long since upgraded away from Audacity 2.0 so can’t recreate.

[andr0id]

Update
Launching elevated won't help - a regression elsewhere is causing run-as-service to be non-functional in last Asset release.
Will be fixed shortly.

Please post debug logs of spurious rescans for me to investigate.

i have a case of "it works fine for me" if you are interested.
25-02-03 running on windows 11.

I did have to move my users/android/.../dbpoweramp files to windows/system32/config/.../dbpoweramp but after that it came up fine and found all my existing instances.