It’s not that “silly & futile”, it’s simply a workaround. Nothing “objectionable” is added to the DB, the problem is that some of the information that one wants isn’t added.
So that Firefly doesn’t perform a complete rescan and overwrite my edits I simply turned off “scan on startup” in adv config and add my new music to Firefly’s DB with the [Start Scan] rather than [Start Full Scan] control.
Apologies to Lori – I haven’t been keeping a watch on this forum as I’d worked around my issues and things had become very stale here (I’m glad to see that there’s now a renewed impetus to maintain Firefly).
The songs table is scanned correctly with the all the appropriate characters in its rows. The playlists scanning “barfs” at lines in M3U files with extended characters: any row representing an M3U file containing extended chars will have an incorrect playlist item count and, consequently, the offending item/songid isn’t updated into the playlistitems table.
The track will be visible in the Firefly library but not the appropriate playlist if viewed, say, from iTunes.
The workaround is simply to update the playlists table, i.e. correct the number of items column for the given playlist row and then add corresponding rows to the playlistitems table (only 3 columns).
Using the SQLite Manager addin to Firefox is very, very straightforward. Just open/connect to the DB with Firefly shutdown and make a copy of the songs.db file before you start (on Windows it’s in c:program filesfirefly….)
I also use MP3TAG, a great tool, but I would prefer to keep the meta-data in its natural language. For interest, my “ingest” process is: EAC rips CD to FLAC, review the tags in MP3TAG, search for album artwork at http://www.albumart.org , resize the artwork found with imagemagik/mogrify to a JPG less than 35k as Firefly seems to have a problem with larger image metadata blocks in FLAC, select & save the artwork to the FLACs with MP3TAG and create an M3U file.
Rgds
Don (vaiodon-at-gmail-dot-com)