Norns tape advancement bug?

[Samuel_Tussing]

Hey hey! ran into an issue(?) with the tape recorder on my shield. it only records to 0000.wav or 0001.wav, and simply overwrites older recordings. anybody else experience this? currently running 200218.

[tehn]

i’ll check it out.

as a heads up, the current tape number is stored in dust/data/system.data and if you don’t shut down correctly, this file may not get saved, hence not storing your file position

[swhic]

maybe consider go back to the old naming system?

[nitefish]

I saw this in the beginning of the week.
I did a reset and the next recording overwrote the 0000 file. I was thinking it was maybe a normal behavior and then I forgot to ask on the forum…

[zebra]

@tehn

dust/data/system.data

(this is actually ~/dust/data/system.state)

since latest update, this file will be deleted on SYSTEM > RESET, which in fact resets the tape counter.

this is expected behavior at the moment. but since RESET is recommended in many situations, i agree that this behavior is bad, because you will start overwriting audio files. i’ll open an issue presently with various options for fixing it.

@swhic

maybe consider go back to the old naming system?

ok… done. let’s not do that instead lets just fix the new behavior that was requested by many users.

@Samuel_Tussing

only records to 0000.wav or 0001.wav

i cannot reproduce this exact behavior without performing a RESET or “dirty shutdown” (e.g. by hard reset or by manually relaunching system processes/services.)

[andrew]

@Samuel_Tussing are you using SYSTEM > SLEEP to power off your shield every time ? unplugging while awake is equivalent to “dirty shutdown” and not good

[Samuel_Tussing]

Thought i was doing a clean shutdown but maybe unplugged power before pi was finished shutting down? I’ve used system reset a few times as well. I’ll dig into it l8r when I’m home

[coreyr]

If this is the case, should I be power cycling norns via system>sleep then powering back up instead of a system>reset when installing a new engine to avoid resetting the tape count?

Edit: can I edit system.state in maiden to ask tape to save starting at number____?

[zebra]

@coreyr

should I be power cycling norns via system>sleep then powering back up instead of a system>reset when installing a new engine to avoid resetting the tape count?

that should do it

Edit: can I edit system.state in maiden to ask tape to save starting at number____?

yes you could do that

WOOPS, no actually that won’t work.

---

opened issue with 2 simple fix ideas

tape counter is reset on RESET

[coreyr]

Editing system.state in maiden, saving, sleeping and starting back up does not seem to fix the problem.

system.state seems to save on clean shutdown and revert to the reset tape count (norns.state.tape = 5 in my case) and not the edited tape increment that I saved in maiden.

[crim]

Was just posting the same issue - I’m not able to edit system.state - something I’ve noticed before. I just tried setting the tape count from 0 to 23, and after a “sleep” and restart, it is back at 0.

I also noticed norns.state.clean_shutdown is set to false, and I would expect it to be true if I am using sleep.

[zebra]

@coreyr

system.state seems to save on clean shutdown

yes i was utterly wrong, duh. system.state will be overwritten on SLEEP - it’s whole purpose is to cache the state at that point.

i don’t know about the clean boot flag, that does seem odd and maybe there is bug in how the flag is managed.

in any case, as regards this particular issue with the tape counters, my inclination is to cut the gordian knot by programatically incrementing the counter based on the current file contents instead of a data field. (proposed solution #2 in the GH issue.)

i gotta sign off for the night. @tehn is visiting and we will be doing some concentrated norns issue triage.

[crim]

I’m curious why people didn’t like the previous naming convention. It seems like using a system timestamp would basically guarantee the filename would always be unique, and you wouldn’t need all the extra logic to keep track of a counter.

[andrew]

not a fan of #2 since I usually move all my tapes into the same folder on my computer from norns which would mean a lot of 0001 copy, 0001 copy 2, 0001 copy 3 etc

timestamp would do the trick with an added “now I know when I made the thing” !

[zebra]

AH. Brian reminded me the reason for not having time stamps. Norns doesn’t have a reliable clock and the timestamps can be sort of random. So there you go

[andrew]

ahhh - well another idea out of my brain would be saving tape count in its own file somewhere

counting up the tape counter is also nice for accomplishments so not necessarily against it either

[JaggedNZ]

Whatever the solution is, I don’t think tape should ever overwrite an existing file? I was quite surprised when it happened to me, but I thought it was fates/upgrade related and I had already backed up my dust, so no biggie.

[zebra]

Of course I agree, hence the gh issue. I’m glad you didn’t lose anything in this instance

https://github.com/monome/norns/issues/1026.

It seems like a good time to move the convo there and start implementing something. IMHO any solution is better than losing data

[robotboot]

A poll would be great I am for sure on team time stamp. And have lost a lot due to the numbering system and getting confused when I’m archiving into my one folder for recordings. What does the default time stamp look like?

[swhic]

I’ve lost quite a few recordings. I don’t have any naming preference as long as recordings are safe!