nPHYN1T3's dashboard

Ya this isn't answered or solved in the sense of getting TB 3 working, it's pretty much crap IMO but as for tracking down the older builds of TB I found that rather hard actually. All the "older" or "other" builds links just looped back to the TB 3 downloads which are freaking useless to those of us fighting this stupid problem.

As for getting version 2.0.0.23 http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozil...

Ya you can mark this as closed, for me anyhow.

Antivirus is a problem in itself but I'll not rant on about that but interestingly (and without any direct link to these problems) I just found this http://gizmodo.com/5424065/you-can-bl... Hope the French enjoy their lost emails :)

Ya and the kicker here is that that article is about RC1 which means that they should have fixed this problem already. Rather it's found it's way into the final release which is why I say the TB team has really dropped the ball on this one. This is also why I think they should move to a more universal "real" folder and plain text/html based files for each email. From here all we can do is either invest enough of our own time and know how to fix this or someone on the team catches wind with enough motivation to squash this "bug."

I highly doubt it, what they need is a db refresh option for users who get stuck in this gray area but since I'm not one of the dev's I can't say if they can or will address this issue with any certainty.

Ya I'd say that's right, either broken indexes in the .msf or it's somehow fucked up the folders. One thing I noticed over the years was that when I upgraded TB or changed certain things it would make more than one profile folder. Some times I would have to move things from one to the "new" one it made that ends in .default. I would end up with littered profile folders and all kinds of crap. I've been using TB a long time, and truthfully I used to HATE it, but my hate for say outlook express was greater so I put up with the flaws of TB. Over time I started to like it as they fixed things and added useful features but there was always this seedy underbelly of problems that would crop up from time to time. They've gotten much less over the years but this was/is a doozy, I really think they should move towards (cringe) a Windows Mail sort of set up where each email is a plain text or html file. Not only is this better for system searches but then you can use grep, awk, or anything the hell else with your mail not to mention if your client craps out on you, you could find the email on the file system and just view in a text editor if you just needed some info in a pinch. The "folders" in TB are just plain text files for the most part but if you have 5 or 8 years I doubt your text editor will open that 4 or 8 gig monster...The TB structure just feels far too vulnerable to "breakage."

About my reply below, possibly over stating things and not on target with your question. If you're missing mail read the reply below, if only live queries are broken you will probably have to delete them and recreate them. I found them to be broken both in TB3 and some were still broken when I went back to TB2, the queries seem to be stored in the .msf files for the query so if TB3 corrupted them you can try to open the .msf in a text editor and fix or just delete then recreate. – nPHYN1T3, on December 09, 2009 21:02

Basically deleting the .msf files forces it to re-scan the actual mail "files" which is just one huge file for each "folder" in TB. The catch is in Linux I use Evolution so if you're in Linux I'm not sure if TB uses the file extension .msf to identify the indexes. If you're in Windows go to your user folder c:\Documents and Settings\(your name here)\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(randomcrap).default (if you have other folders in here you may need to fish in them too but that's a whole other ordeal)

Now in here you will see a bunch of crap, you want to go into "Mail" from here you may have many folders depending on how many accounts you have TB managing. basically you want to hunt down and delete all the .msf files in all the folder (however keep the ones that represent live query searches/filters). You may want to move them with the option of putting them back but I just deleted them, they're broken anyhow.

Make sure TB isn't running when you do this then relaunch it. It should manually rescan all your mail "folders" now which may take a long time if you have years worth of crap like me. There should be a progress bar at the bottom unless you have your status bar disabled/hidden and after a while you should finally have your stuff back.

As for the live filters/queries some I had to delete and re-create while others I was able to get back by pissing around with the msf files for them. With mail folders the .msf seems to be the index where as the .msf files for live queries seems to store the query itself. I could be wrong as I've never looked at the source code or documentation of these systems this is just how it seems from my snooping and research thus far.

Things might be a bit trickier for you also due to how you have your accounts set up, all mine use the local folders so my queries etc are much faster and more accurate. I found having separate accounts and using imap for hotmail and gmail accounts resulted in a lot of glitches and stupidity with queries where as using pop for all web and non web based mail alike as well as centralized folders made queries much more accurate and functional.

Finally you will need to edit your prefs.js in c:\Documents and Settings\(your name here)\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(randomcrap).default there will be about 5 or 7 lines that record the "smart folders" for tb3 in here. Delete those lines while Thunderbird is not running and restart. The garbage from Tb3 will be gone.

While the sizes of certain folders seem to be wrong in my Profiles folder when viewed via "Windows Explorer" I've been able to force rescanning of the files by nuking the .msf files which has in fact found that all my mail is still there just TB3 gibbed or only partially re-did the msf files. My other points however stand, with the mixed beta labels in the welcome and thanks docs to the beta labeled shortcuts this is a terrible confused, unpolished, and utterly worthless update to an otherwise great program.

I hate these experiences because for obvious starters the software is free. However I typically see these projects as being pretty passionate but this seems like they were bored with working on TB3 and just said "ahh screw it just release the beta and tell them it's final." It's due to the typical degree of polish and trust I have that I do something foolish like not back up my profiles folder before hand. I never fear installing a Firefox update why should I be scared of "the bird?" I'm fully aware anything can go wrong with the best of software paid for or other wise but TB is really fail sauce. I've read so many articles that outlined all these great aspirations for TB3, how it was going to revolutionize how we deal with our email and contacts...how Lightning was going to become integrated, I got some tabs and an icon change... WOW...really...WOW...

Ya I too moved to μtorrent and haven't given a shit about this in ages, it's actually been annoying me that all the sudden after like almost a fucking YEAR now it's got all this activity, to the dev, just give up :) You clearly don't have time or care so don't stretch yourself, but probably best to remove the extension so you don't get flamed for the next 40 years. (No longer following)

I just tried Songbird again just to make sure I wasn't talking out my ass about things maybe that have changed, I mean it's been 8 months since I originally posted and I think 2 or 3 releases since. However upon install:
-I'm still locked out while it scans my media, FAIL
-It does not remember what I was listening to (not even the recently played is working for me)
-installing an Add-on is fail unless you restart, cool I get to have my groove disrupted, how wonderful.
-oh oh wait for it..."Minimize to Tray" STILL DOESN'T WORK!? Are you serious!? ARE YOU #$%%ing SERIOUS?!
-It still messes with my mind I need to have options about pop-up blocking in my Music player...
-Media library searches are very slow compared to other apps.
-Installing add-ons not only kill groove but again since Songbird does not have a current play playlist it loses my tunes unless I go out of my way to save what I'm listening to as a playlist. I say this because while trying to find a working minimize to tray I had to restart to disable/uninstal the original and restart again once I found something else to try, yay yay yay!
-Add-on for tray controls is uninstallable awesome! I didn't want it anyhow right?

I'm being cheeky/angry about this stuff because IMO these should be standard program options, but the fact they are add-ons shows there is some idea of CHOICE, however the browser thing is forced on us so I'm definitely droning on this topic. What choice is given is disruptive, broken and distracting. The UI is still very fixed and doesn't allow for dragging panes or sections around despite the fact 99% of what I want to do *IS* possible in Firefox. I can't help but feel like right or wrong this is kinda like the nut sweat of the Fox has been mopped up and wrung out into this project.

However through these 8 months I have adopted FooBar as my player of choice and this is said only because it too was very frustrating. FooBar is a very "logical" player and until or unless you see the programmers logic right away some things were/are hard to grasp. It took a while to design my UI and behavior the way I wanted however the curve was rewarding. The plugins WORK, the app is solid, fast, clean, etc. It's from this I'd probably say that's the end of it but the crappy thing about Foobar is if I'm in BSD or Linux it won't be, unless I jerry up WINE.

However I dare say the focus and goal of SongBird will never be anything I have interest in so I'll leave this as it is, I've more than reiterated my issues and thus far it looks like the dev team has no care to deal with things like the fact on a scheduled folder scan for media it can do it in the background but the first one locks you out, so very unwelcoming.

On an amusing note with the project focus I'm not sure why they haven't also tried to add the Frostwire/Limewire or μTorrent code base because lots of albums are legally free and released under CC license via Torrents. I mean why not right, cuz we need a browser in our music player why not a torrent program too, or maybe someone can make a broken add-on for that. /me shakes head, what a mess.

While I'm glad to see my discussion picking up again I think the idea is that adding the browser at all is a terrible idea for many reasons. Not only is this rather against the ideas of choice it introduces problems all the way to attack vectors, so let's take a quick look.

First off just to shock you guys what if a person is an IE user, and I've already pointed out the choice thing before but let's recap before the more serious issues. Now that everyone is ready to freak out (I hate IE myself) the point is a very simple one about choice. If the user is an Opera person, don't force Firefox on them. A plugin is a much more intelligent option since almost all broswers even the very immature Chrome supports some type of plugin architecture. This will allow all people to enjoy this (to me bizarre) functionality in and with the browser of their choice. I would dare say writing 7 or 8 browser plugins would be easier to maintain than a full browser code base but the reasons behind this become more obvious when we look at the nature of what this means.

Second this browser in a mediaplayer is a hazard due tot he nature of exploits and release schedules. While I realize streaming media, podcasts, and embeded media might be a desired item by a song bird user if a serious exploit is found with Firefox we now have to worry that our media player is also a target. If this was a plugin those issues are delegate to the browser teams rather that duplicating the issue and now two programs and their respective teams must scramble to protect their user base.

This is also a display of the difference between say the Windows/Apple/Linux/BSD/Qnx/etc worlds. While on Windows the development team will do their thing and release fixes and updates. In say the Linux/BSD/etc world we're either stuck building from source or waiting for our distribution team (or some random person) to build a package for us after the development team has stepped in and fixed things. This model of distribution is bloody insane to me and makes me cringe when even on distro's released yesterday I'm using outdated versions of OpenOffice or Firefox but the point is we're introducing more time between certain fixes and adding more of a security hazard to our system. Even if the plugin is the attack vector security falls on the respective team to fix it, say the Chrome team, and maybe it's only the Chrome on Linux. Maybe the Safari plugin on Mac OS. And Song bird users are not waiting for the firefox team to make an official patch to which then we have to wait for the song bird team to adopt it then all the terrible distribution methods funnel that to all the users on all the differing platforms.

Third is bloat, and this argument has also been done to death, stop bloat sweet jesus stop it. If I wanted bloat I'd be using WMP or iTunes. I'll not dwell here...

Fourth is focus what is this app supposed to be? A way to force Firefox on everyone, even those who already use and love Firefox? Is there a more intelligent way to integrate with existing systems and software on a given platform? Almsot every system has a way to pipe commands from other programs to browsers etc. Why can Songbird not leverage this and have intelligent switching or notifications so not to steal focus rudely. You might be able to be non-plugin based and have a wonderful user experience actually playing music.

four point five, this is my again old and busted gripe about preferences. I use Komodo Edit for coding, which is also Firefox based, the difference is when I look at my options they reflect what this program is supposed to be doing. When I open the Soundbird options/preferences it looks like it doesn't know what the F&*@ it wants to be. Almost all the options are for a browser and almost none of the options I want for my music are there, not to mention the busted ass plugins that work on Firefox but not on Song bird.

Fifth, from a memory management point of view two Firefoxes, or Firefox and Safari, no matter how you cut bind and combine them if they are unaware of each others efforts and memory and you can end up with massive memory pigs running together possibly loading the same content because someone reading their daily news stumbled across one thing that led to another and now they found some cool music, but since there is no integration with their browser of choice they fire up songbird, go to the same site, now their duplicating their system memory loading all the same shit twice or maybe more, yay for us!

Sixth we have all the busted UI issues I brought up and the fact we the user should decide how and where we want things. The feathers should ONLY decorate those items where we have placed them, not dictate where things are placed. Looks however are not the only busted thing about the UI and while I've not tested Songbird in a bit release after release left me with stupid things like adding your media library location locked you out of the program while it scans. You can't check options, or even listen to music (which is what this dumb thing is for isn't it?) while it scans. Now my whole families music in on a central server so it's about 80 gigs to scan so I get to try Songbird like 3 hours after I install it. Most times this is a wait 2 hours for it to let me DO something to find out it sucks, it's slow, it's broken, and I hate to wait 2 or 3 hours to even try thing one to uninstall it 20 minutes afterwards. This locked out "I can't multitask" behavior is so stupid I can barely contain my anger when an app does it. Rather than being able to jump right in my first impression is oh uh...I get to wait three hours to see if I like this...cool cuz I bought my computer to wait on things. I think it's obvious this isn't about impatience, but yet if I wanted to wait I'd still be using my 75 mhz machine, cuz I can wait apparently. So back to focus, is this a secrect prgram to make the world a more patient place? A covert "Adopt Firefox" program? or a F^&@ing music player?

The end result is don't add a browser at all, it's just not a good idea. We all have fricking browsers, make shit work with what we have. Don't think this is possible? Then give up, seriously, I hate Apple but one of the reasons they are gaining market and traction is this idea that is this possible, probably not, let's make it possible sort of attitude. Firefox also brought this, can free software not suck, can we bring new ideas to the table, oh and Opera too, Opera has pioneered a LOT of features and ideas we see as common place today, because they didn't sit on their ass and try to copy or integrate someone elses crap. Well Opera, purists can argue Firefox is based on the old Netscape code base and they adopted others js engines yada yada but you get my drift, they adopted things that are not being duplicated on a users system. Except maybe Windows and Mac users who are forced into installing Safari or IE. I think my point is made thoug for whomever has had the patience to read my insanely long posts :)

This is kinda funny, about 2 weeks after installing this I downloaded a few torrents yesterday for NetBSD 5 and so on when I realized my torrent software was not opening. I then noticed the torrents were being pulled in Firefox. 2 weeks, several reboots, several torrents later and all kinds of other stuff and it just randomly started working. Sadly as soon as I saw how it worked I uninstalled it as there are no decent options once you're downloading, like pause or resume. This makes several things kinda tough to do.

I also have this problem...Sadly this seems cool but be damned if I can get the file associations correct so that it will indeed handle torrents over my previous software. There is no options to ensure it will be the default torrent handler and adjusting in the fox assoc and Windows file extensions yield the same 'fail.'

It has potential, that's typically why I let myself get sucked in by the hype each release and try it again. I look at Songbird like I do Most anything Apple, I want to use Songbird, just like there are certain reasons I'd like to own/use Apple products. I bitch because I want to see stuff made better. I'm not the easiest dude to please but my job is very UI based and I'm constantly working with software across tons of OS's.

In the end I think Songbird feels immature. You can tell when apps feel mature, over the hill, good, etc adn Songbird still has that glitchy feel it did almost a year or so ago. That said it does feel a bit more solid, most the REAL bugs have been fixed like the massive lag you used to get when trying to even delete a playlist but it still feels unpolished. Feel, behavior, functionality is all very personal so it's hard to describe intangible things in a rant like manner. I know I rant, I figure most times I'm just seen as a troll, but my tact is still in beta itself :)

However things like the fact Minimize to tray has like 3 or 4 versions for Songbird and not one works is a real deal breaker by itself. In every OS I use my music player has a 'go to tray' style functionality but trying Songbird I - out of almost 10 years habit- click that damned X thinking it will go to tray. You know what happens from here though...the F&*#er closes...which nukes my play items...and I'm back to square one and annoyed.

There are a few things I lost in a comment a while back about Foobar etc. I've tried iTunes, and iTunes sorta feels like this situation to me, Don't tell me how I like my stuff to be configured, and Apple does that. I ME decide how I expect things to work, and this is a tricky situation because this could become a old dog new tricks - kill innovation discussion. I've tried atunes and it's 20 variants, wxMusic etc. My point is I don't have an issue with innovation if you can make it work! That said Foobar, IAMP, aTunes, and the zillion others I've tried all miss the mark. Some are closer than others, but then fail miserably on something really important. Foobar is very flexible in certain ways, but fails to be coherent in behavior Vs. the panels/features I have chosen.

For me I'd rather have a bridge between apps. Having the same sorta crap like bookmarks between apps becomes like having to sync your stuff across your desktop, laptop, work machine, it's a pain. To sync freely and with anticipation between so many apps/machines and to do it seamlessly is near impossible with out a lot of BS and insecure practices IMO. It also causes the redundant application base I was talking about. We already have a web browser, so why does Songbird require a web browser? Are we too stupid to download music with a web browser to were we want it? Some maybe, most probably not. It's just more crap for us to keep track of and redundancy in the name is ease of use. If they want to make something cool make this *MUSIC PLAYER* (I really stress this is my expectation of Songbird) work with YOUR browser of choice, (which by Songbirds nature must be cross platform ready anyhow) not give you another browser. In the end I want something that works, allows me to ENJOY things as I see it to be enjoyable, that doesn't say force a Firefox embedded browser on me if I'm a Konqueror user and force redundant software on me.

This also feels like Miro Vs. VLC. It never fails to make me go WTF?! when something works in VLC but fails in Miro. I love having VLC, Media Player Classic, MP6.4 Winamp, and then a ton of other tools to 'manage' my music because Winamp tagging tools are useless and stupid. Some files play in VLC and not Winamp, Other files only play in mpc... UG! One piece of software for each purpose, that works, and when functionality would be good to cross, bridge them, but not embed or build off them. Find a way to make Songbird do it's thing but work for Opera users, Safari users, IE users, and don't tell us the user what to use. Songbird is offering a choice in music player, then sneaks a browser in on you like Apple sneaking in their BS when you install Quick Time. All the sudden that option for auto updated I UNCHECKED is running, and installed, despite the fact I said NO...and I've got a new freaking web browser...I was never given an option for that?! It just installed it! SOB! Is this the Songbird way?! [It's Apples :)]

--- and to Valiero, I never said remove those features, I just think more options can be given to users withOUT making the option array too overwhelming to let those who like/use that stuff do, and those of us who don't not. My gripe is there is not enough flexibility or focus. Maybe in a few years the vision will have solidified into something great, but I think right now with the software issue I face everyday this is a step in the wrong direction for a 'Firefox' class project.

Aside from the fact this dumb thing lost my reply about cross platform / OS issues I think it's wondrous that they ask for feed back then other flame people for giving feed back.

My point is the app needs a direction because it's trying to be 3 things and doesn't pull off any of the 3 well. That said the UI should allow users to drag elements where they please. Titlebar might not be possible on some OS's but that doesn't mean I need huge chunks of nothing in a section to house JUST the search on the far right.

As for feathers changing the layout that's a terrible idea as then you might find the layout you want but it comes in some terrible color or visual style. Allow people to place elements where they want, and allow feathers to decorate those elements but do not allow the feather to dictate both!

To theaulddubliner every time I install this program I get asked about feed back and usage metrics, if you don't like me giving them what they asked for maybe you should ask for your money back. I know it's free dumb ass. See this is why Open Source for so long has sucked or housed flame wars for so long. One group wants Program X to be HUGE, used by the masses, they encourage everyone they know to use it. Then the masses want something done and all the sudden people whip out the "It's free so there's no user accountability." argument. Sure it's free, but if you ask for end user feedback you're not going to get roses 100% of the time. If it's free and you don't give a fuck about your users then don't ask for their input. If you think I'm 100% on crack well then I guess the whole Winamp user base is too, because you know they hate features like a persistent 'current playlist' enough that they keep forgetting to remove this terrible idea from the builds each release.

I dunno man, I was thinking about it after I posted this and really the app seems like it wants to be Frostwire/Limewire with a web browser UI that handles it's purpose (music) as an afterthought. iTunes has lot of the same stuff that annoys me, so I can see iTunes users liking Songbird a lot. For me though it's all over the place. I have Frostwire, I have Firefox, why am I collecting all this redundant cross bred software? I used to use Azereus for torrents but the same question arose. Why do I have 12 apps that all do the same thing. So I started cleaning house. It really cheeses me that I have like 5 'media players' on my machine. It just seems idiotic that software has so much overlap, yet nothing is complete. It really frustrates the hell out of me.

In truth MusikCube was my ray of hope up until R1. R1 introduced more bugs than fixes or features and then the primary project leader had to bail due to a conflict of interest with his job. The end result was it pretty much died at birth. Some people are working on MusikCube 2 but the stuff I've tried isn't usable yet and I've been looking for years to jump ship from Winamp for several reasons. There is so much hype behind Songbird I keep holding out hope... install a new release, get mad...wish I had time to code my own damn app...but then think why do I have to code new when we have 1200 damn programs for every OS. Which a more sensible approach would be to add the extensibility to an existing project >like Songbird< rather than create more fractured software projects that continue the cycle of overlap and code inbreeding adding to pointless user choice and frustration...