[isotope feeney]

Originally Posted by mike1061

Sometimes people change the titles of the songs after they made the checksums. It kinda seems like that happened here. What I do is open the check sums in note pad and comapare them to the song titles. Seems odd that all of them would fail for another reason. I've also seen torrents made in other countrys where something like "~" shows up different on my computer. Or where a symbol is different. For example " ' " . Or maybe on mac computer. Just change the file names to match the check sums.
Thanks
Mike

Your suggestion about crosschecking filenames didn’t directly solve the problem, but it led me down the path to a solution, and for that I thank you.

I’ll try to keep this short and sweet (well, short anyway). I know listening to other people’s technoproblems can be like listening to other people’s health problems (or watching other people’s vacation slides) - - - interesting for THEM maybe, but for you not so much. But you might find this interesting…

I took yr. advice and converted md5 into a text file. The filetitles LOOKED identical to the originals, but as you rightly pointed out, ya can’t always tell by looking (it could be something as trivial as a capital period versus a lower case period --- the type of thing you could NEVER tell by looking). (And as you rightly intuited, these torrents were from another country: Germany I think, I don’t always recognize those little flags that tell you where people are from).

Anyhoo, as an experiment I copy-and-pasted a single decoded md5 filetitle over the original title, to see if that would do anything. Same error message: file cannot be found in directory. I then changed the textfile back to md5 (just changed the file extension back). Just to see what would happen, I doubleclicked on the reconverted (md5>text>md5) shortcut, which opened TLH as usual. I clicked on verify, and lo and behold, it functioned. All I got was error messages for each file, which made sense because the md5 that I had converted into text was a COPY of the original, in a separate folder with no other (FLAC) files. I had made a clone of the original because I knew from experience that once I started playing games with it, I’d never be able to remember WTF I had done in case I ever needed to get back to square one to try a different approach.

So anyway, this was progress. Originally when I had clicked on verify, TLH just gave me one single global error message: checksum file cannot be found in directory. Now a least it was LOOKING for the FLAC files. On a hunch, I copy-and-pasted the FLACs from their original folder into this new folder (again I COPIED them and didn’t MOVE them, because in case this didn’t get me where I wanted to go, I wanted to have the original files intact --- as I told dasmueller above, I had already determined that FLACs would at least PLAY in VLC, so I wanted to keep them unharmed for any future experimentation down that road).

So you can see where this is going. Once I had copy of md5 and copies of FLACs in a new folder, I ran md5 in TLH: checksums match, no errors. Then I imported FLACs into TLH: everything decoded, easy as pie.

WHY any of this would work, I have no idea. I didn’t really CHANGE anything, I just copied the original files, as-is, into a new folder. I guess it’s like when your car won’t start, and you start panicking: Now what? Then the next day it starts up like always, and you never have the problem (whatever it was) again. So you stop thinking about it. None of this make any sense, but I got to decode the torrent, so I’m not complaining.

Okay, that whole explanation wasn’t as ‘Readers’ Digest’-y as I intended, but like I said maybe you’ll find it interesting. And I never would’ve got to my moment of triumph without your initial suggestion, so for that I thank you again!



Jason