Fantasia, Windows cannot open instruments database

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Yngfwuhr
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Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:35 pm

Fantasia, Windows cannot open instruments database

Post by Yngfwuhr » Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:48 pm

Hi all,

I'm new to Linuxsampler, but excited to use it with my old gig-library with my Windows 10 based DAW. I've got one big problem with it, though.

When starting Fantasia 0.9 i get a cannot open instruments database error both in Fantasia and in Linuxsampler console. Interestingly enough, my username in Windows is "Yngve Selén" (yea, acute accents in system variables is never a good idea, but this is the way it is now....) and from Fantasia I get "Cannot open instruments database: C:\Users\Yngve Selén\.linuxsampler\instruments.db" and from the console "Cannot open instruments database: C:\Users\Yngve SelÚn\.linuxsampler\instruments.db" <-- note the difference, SelÚn vs Selén... not sure if it makes any difference, but it is a bit interesting...

...anyhow. Following nice online instructions ("linuxsampler --create-instruments-db instruments.db") I was able to generate a database file. I copied this file to the directory where Fantasia is searching (and to the console directory as well, just to be sure). I know that this file now is there!

...still the same error message. And I'm not able to do anything in Fantasia with any database, e.g., I cannot create a new file.

This is quite frustrating. I can load individual instrument files, but this is a bit messy. Is there any friendly and capable windows Linuxsampler user who has any idea how to fix this?

Many thanks!

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cuse
Developer
Posts: 366
Joined: Wed Jan 23, 2008 10:07 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Fantasia, Windows cannot open instruments database

Post by cuse » Sun Sep 25, 2016 10:50 pm

I guess the accent character is stored and returned by the Windows file system as Unicode character, not as extended ASCII character and either the Fantasia GUI or the LinuxSampler backend has an issue to convert it. The quickest way for you to solve this issue for you right now is obviously by storing the database file somewhere outside your users directory, and then you could add the --instruments-db-location argument to the linuxsampler launch instruction for providing the new location of your instruments DB file:

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linuxsampler --instruments-db-location C:\some\where\instruments.db
However if you want to help the overall issue to be resolved, you might want to play around by sending some of the instruments DB commands manually to LinuxSampler for finding out who to blame, Fantasia, LinuxSampler or both. Here is the relevant section from the LSCP documentation which describes how special characters are encoded.

For playing around with some commands, first make sure LinuxSampler is running, then open a regular command line terminal, then type

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lscp
which will start LinuxSampler's "LSCP shell" which you can use to type and send commands to the sampler manually (refer to the linked LSCP documentation for details).

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