Trader's Little Helper

[isotope feeney]

It looks lie all the posts I this forum are YEARS old, so I dunno if anyone's listening, but here goes:

I downloaded a torrent, got to 100%. When I went to run md5 in TLH, I got error message:

Checksum file not found in directory.

When I tried to decode FLAC files to see if that would work, I got error messages (one for each line):

file not found in directory.

Nothing else I tried to do in TLH (re-encode FLAC, for instance) would happen either. Same message.

I'm not sure what the version # of TLH is, but when I checked for updates it said You have the latest version... installed.

[dasmueller]

Do the files play using Winamp ?

[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

[gojikranz]

hello I have been happily using traders little helper for years with no major issues. then today i tried to use it and got "error while closing handle(s)" message this happened for anything i have tried to convert today (SHN and Flac).

as far as i know i have not made any big changes to anything so i don't understand why this would happen.

i tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. any ideas?

[isotope feeney]

Originally Posted by dasmueller

Do the files play using Winamp ?

Good point! I don’t have Winamp loaded in to this particular computer, but after yr. question I checked to see if the FLAC files would playback in VLC, which they did. This was only more confusing, because obviously the FLACs were there intact, but TLH for some reason couldn’t ‘see’ them.

But for the rest of the story, see my reply to mike1061 below…

[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

[dasmueller]

glad you were successful ! interesting as well.

[gojikranz]

any ideas on my issue?

[spidergawd]

Originally Posted by isotope feeney

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).

You can try looking at the file with a hex editor, sometimes a text file can contain non-printable bytes that md5 software will "think" is part of a file name and therefore be unable to find the file. For example a .md5 file created with MSDOS will often (always?) have a carriage return byte at the end of each line, which will screw up the linux version of md5sum. This probably has nothing to do with what happened in your situation, but still it's a good idea to own a decent hex editor.

[JDM111er]

A little help please....

I can't seem to find TLH file conversion download. I used it for FLAC conversion to wav but, recently scrubbed my computer and need to download it again.

Thanks in advance

[jabulon]

http://tlh.easytree.org/

[gojikranz]

no ideas about my issue? is there a different program i can use?

[roann]

Originally Posted by gojikranz

hello I have been happily using traders little helper for years with no major issues. then today i tried to use it and got "error while closing handle(s)" message this happened for anything i have tried to convert today (SHN and Flac).

as far as i know i have not made any big changes to anything so i don't understand why this would happen.

i tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. any ideas?

It's almost impossible to tell what's wrong on your side... some thoughts:

1. The error while closing handle(s) message often indicates insufficient access rights (multiple users try to access the same file and file open attributes are not set to allow sharing, or the files to be processed with TLH are located in a directory you don't have access rights for (even if you're logged in as an admin), for example).
   
2. TLH tries to write to a target directory that you don't have write access to (even if you're logged in as an admin).
   
3. Anti-virus and/or firewall program settings have changed.
   
4. Windows remembers a lot of things. If you completely uninstall TLH including re-boot, there still might be something in the registry that could cause troubles after you've re-installed TLH.
   Only a) if you are really familiar with using the registry and b) if you know what you're doing when tampering with Windows:
   1. Uninstall TLH and re-boot.
   2. Open the Registry Editor and remove entries that hold one of the following programs if and only if the programs are located in the CmdlineApps subfolder of TLH's installation folder:
      aucdtect.exe, flac.exe, lame.exe, mac.exe, metaflac.exe, mkwcon.exe, mkwm4.drv, shntool.exe, shorten.exe, tralih.exe.
   3. Close the Registry Editor.
   4. Open Windows Explorer and empty the prefetch folder (a subfolder of the Windows system folder).
   5. Re-boot.
   6. Install TLH to the folder the setup suggests.
   7. Re-boot and try using TLH.

Hope this helps.
Robert

[macio]

hello, I got a problem: when i'm trying to do anything (Decode/convert) i got this message:
"an Os error occured while executing the DOS subcomponent"
I have tried to uninstall and reinstall THL but it's always the same
I use VISTA and recently i got to reinstall the whole Operating System
Thanks for the attention
Massimo

[Yer Blues]

I downloaded the latest utorrent version and screw up my computer, now I can't download or upload anything, please I need help. what is the best working version of utorrent, the latest sucks.