Can't bulk download music

[Daniel Webster]

Using the "Update Metadata and Media for Selected Games" wizard, LaunchBox flat out refuses to download Music from EmuMovies. No error message, the operation simply completes without result.

Now, if I right-click the entry for an individual game - "Edit -> Edit Metadata/Media -> Media -> Download Media... etc", it works just fine, assuming there's a music Download available for that game. But trying to do any more than one at a time? Nuh uh.

Not too keen to do that for all 1796 games in my collection.. suspect this is a bug, or am I missing something? On version 12.3.

[brian]

Hi Daniel,

When using the 'Download Metadata and Media for Selected Games…” did you remember to select all your games first before running the tool?

Press CTRL+A to select your games and run the tool again, and let us know if you are still experiencing the same issue.

[Daniel Webster]

Hi Brian

Yes, I get the same result whether I have two games selected or my entire collection (using CTRL-A as you suggest). It gets as far as briefly displaying "searching for music media" in the status bar at the bottom, then the operation completes without having downloaded anything. The only case in which it does work is when downloading media for a single game.

Since logging the initial bug report I've also tried the EmuMovies Sync utility found here: https://emumovies.com/files/file/321-emumovies-sync/ It also behaves strangely - it downloads some music for some platforms, but for others (e.g. Commodore Amiga) downloads none, listing all games in the outputted "missing.txt" file, even though many of these games do have music tracks available for individual download from EmuMovies through the Launchbox interface. Obviously their tool is outside of your control, I only mention it because it suggests to me there might be something funky going on at their end.

Thanks Danny

[Daniel Webster]

To further complicate and/or elucidate things: I've since been browsing the EmuMovies FTP server, and was puzzled when I couldn't find any music for many of the Commodore Amiga games which LaunchBox had successfully retrieved music for (i.e. when downloading media for a single game) - take the example in this case of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

However on further browsing I discovered that EmuMovies does have music for the Atari ST port of The Adventures of Robin Hood, and that it's this mp3 which Launchbox had downloaded for the Amiga version (but again only when downloading individually). It appears then that the scraper is behaving differently for individual vs batch downloads - in the former case it's downloading music when the title matches even if the platform doesn't; in the latter case it's only downloading music where both the title and platform match. Probably debatable which of these behaviours is to be preferred, but presumably the different behaviour isn't intended. Personally I'm a completionist more than a perfectionist so I'd love to have the option to use platform-imperfect matches with bulk downloads.

FWIW I've pored over what's available on the FTP server and it does in fact appear that it's doing the batch downloads correctly based on the platform-matching behaviour - EmuMovies music database is just less comprehensive than I'd assumed.

On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 12:17 PM Daniel Webster [e-mail] wrote:

Hi Brian

Yes, I get the same result whether I have two games selected or my entire collection (using CTRL-A as you suggest). It gets as far as briefly displaying "searching for music media" in the status bar at the bottom, then the operation completes without having downloaded anything. The only case in which it does work is when downloading media for a single game.

Since logging the initial bug report I've also tried the EmuMovies Sync utility found here: https://emumovies.com/files/file/321-emumovies-sync/ It also behaves strangely - it downloads some music for some platforms, but for others (e.g. Commodore Amiga) downloads none, listing all games in the outputted "missing.txt" file, even though many of these games do have music tracks available for individual download from EmuMovies through the Launchbox interface. Obviously their tool is outside of your control, I only mention it because it suggests to me there might be something funky going on at their end.

Thanks Danny