Pedalboard file confusion

so i’m trying to make sense of the pedalboard file storage on the MOD… 3 questions to start with:

  1. why does everything have a date-stamp of “Jan 1”? …some with different times, and a lot with just “1970”, but all Jan 1. it’d be nice to have actual dates, to help sort out pedalboard versions.

  2. there are pedalboards which have been deleted in the browser GUI, but which still exist in the .pedalboards directory. why? and can we recover any of those for use in the MOD?

  3. pedalboard names are truncated to 16 characters, it seems. now that i know that, i’ll keep it in mind, because differentiation when looking in the filesystem can be confusing if i’ve named them certain ways, using more characters than that. but what are the ones ending in a dash followed by a 5-digit number?

thanks a lot! :slight_smile:

Before anything… please note that you’re looking at things that normal users will never see, or perhaps even care.

This is because the Duo does not have a real-time clock inside.
Everytime you power it on, it starts counting time from 0, which in POSIX systems means January 1 1970.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

I guess those are leftovers for failed operations.
You can try to manually recover, of course.

the number suffix is to make sure the filename is unique.
when saving, the pedalboard folder name is converted into a valid path name and truncated, so it doesn’t get unnecessarily long.
if a folder with that exact name already exists, it tries a random number until it finds one that is unique, and thus okay for use.

of course! totally understood… but thanks for your explanations, nevertheless! :slight_smile:

how does one go about a manual pedalboard recovery?

manually go into the folders and try to fix them?
see if the content is still valid, contains errors or is corrupted, manually removing the bad stuff, etc etc

ok, so pedalboards should appear in the GUI list simply by virtue of being present in the .pedalboards directory AND being valid? i.e. there isn’t some other file which maintains a list of current pedalboards, for the purposes of presentation in the GUI?

oh, and i guess there’s currently no mechanism which clears out corrupted files - they would just keep accumulating, right?

thanks a lot, @falkTX!

also correct.
it’s the same for plugin bundles by the way.

automatically deleting broken files could be done, but then it hurts users that know how to fix them.
perhaps this can be something for the v1.5 settings panel, later on.

2 Likes

Hello,

I just want to inform you, that we changed this behaviour at the zynthian project a little.

We are moving the existing pedalboard to a hidden file that contains a random number.
Only one hidden file for each “titlesym” is allowed.
Thinking about it, even the random number is not necessary anymore.

Kind regards,
Markus

Using just one “titlesym” is the wrong approach though.
You might have a pedalboard called “My pedal with a big name #1”, which gets truncated when saving (there’s no real reason to use the full title as filename there).
Then the user saves a new pedalboard, this time called “My pedal with a big name #2”.
In your version, the 1st pedalboard is apparently deleted when saving the 2nd one, as the user doesn’t really know what happened.

Not only that, but non-character symbols get converted to underscores.
So saving a pedalboard with name “Cão de caça” will overwrite “C@o de caña”.

It’s not something that will happen frequently, but it can happen.
If you really need to only have 1 pedalboard with the same name, then you need more work on your approach.