"Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

2018-07-29 21:19:13

I've just changed my NAS from a WD MyCloud to a Synology DS218, and moved my music share to the DS. It's just a normal Samba/SMB share mapped to a drive letter in Windows 7x64. Previously, on the WD, everything worked as expected. Now...

If I copy a new folder into my music share on the NAS, fb2k does not update the album list. I have to manually rescan to see the new subfolder. Also, if I edit the tags of a file in fb2k (usually I load a cue sheet and embed it into a single FLAC file) that is not reflected in fb2k either, until I rescan.

If I rename an existing folder, or a newly copied but not yet listed folder, or delete a folder, that change is seen immediately in the album list.

Windows' Explorer always sees all these changes immediately. I use a different file manager to move them around but I watched Explorer as I did so.

In fb2k's console, I get this message when I copy a new folder into the share:

Location not parsable: "N:\Music\test_folder_1", reason: Access denied

I do of course have full access to the share and the folders/files have read/write attributes.

I'm not claiming this is a fault in fb2k; it worked fine with the WD. It does seem possible though that there is some incompatibility going on, so I'm posting here as well as raising a support ticket with Synology.

If there is anything I can do to narrow down and fix this issue, or tell Synology what needs fixing, please help.

Re: "Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

Reply #1 – 2018-08-02 22:26:44

After a fair bit of backwards and forwards with Synology support, their conclusion is it's nothing to do with them, there is nothing wrong with the NAS and must be something about how fb2k works. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Re: "Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

Reply #2 – 2018-09-10 19:41:28

Incompatibility with Synology NAS acknowledged and confirmed, thanks for reporting.

Re: "Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

Reply #3 – 2018-09-11 08:46:37

Folder monitoring on Synology shares is not recursive. This is common with old / buggy versions of Samba employed by some NAS devices.
What happens is that fb2k gets told that a new folder - with nothing yet inside - got added. It scans the folder and finds no files. Notifications for the files inside are not fired, so fb2k continues to think that the folder is empty until it gets told to rescan it anyway disregarding the notifications.
Obviously none of this is an issue for Windows Explorer, which does not rely on recursive folder monitoring - and it does notice everything that goes on directly in the folder being browsed.
Fb2k also fails to notice other kinds of changes in subfolders of the watched folder, for the same reason.
I'm open to suggestions how to work around this - other than piling options to work around vendor specific bugs - since other NAS vendors do not have this problem in their current-generation devices.

Re: "Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

Reply #4 – 2018-09-12 16:21:04

Thank you for the confirmation and explanation. I wish I could help with a solution.

It's a shame on Synology that they were hardly interested and have the attitude that their device only needs to work with Windows Explorer. So much for 'upgarding' from an older and poor quality (I hacked the settings to make it usable) WD to a latest generation Syno.

It doesn't stop me enjoying the best audio manager/player there is though

Re: "Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

Reply #5 – 2018-09-13 10:27:54

Just a few weeks ago I was about to move my primary development storage from QNAP to Synology - being fed up with QNAP bugs - but Synology's completely lame encryption support was enough of a warning sign. I moved to a newer QNAP instead.

Sadly every NAS vendor sucks one way or another. Too bad that one typically notices such things when it's too late.

You are probably best off disabling folder monitoring in fb2k entirely ( which you can do by right clicking folders in Media Library preferences ). You can then bind some keyboard shortcut to "Rescan folders" which will quickly find any changes made.

Re: "Location not parsable" when adding folders to my NAS share

Reply #6 – 2018-09-13 18:33:42

Thank you Peter, that is an excellent suggestion for a work-around that I'll implement right now

(I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it. I routinely remap keyboard keys and various other controls for specific programs here.)