kuneho

I know, I know. I really shouldn't use NTFS with Linux if I plan to write to it, especially not my only backup drive, which is my external media drive for libreELEC as well.

So I was moving/copying/renaming stuff through SMB on my libreELEC machine. And then suddenly I noticed 50 episodes of old-school Sonic animated series just... disappeared. Strange, but I continued renaming files, and those too poof nonexistent anymore.

Okay, maybe a Dolphin bug - I thought, since I was using Dolphin for SMB. But same from Android (I'm using Solid Explorer)

Then, Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex too disappeared. Then some episode of Serial Experiments Lain.

Star Trek Discovery? Fucking gone, tho I didn't mind that one. All of the files are 0B. Then Regular Show.

Now, this was the point where I needed to step in. Linux just didn't see the files.

Oh well, I have a Windows 10 PC I use for work so it was a time for bringing the drive "home" and give it some chkdsk, in the meantime I was really hoping it wouldn't just destroy my 4TB backup drive. Wasn't sure it would work, but that was pretty much my only hope and idea. Trying to access those folders and files from Windows gave me error messages before the check.

The check and fix dialog of chkdsk was also kinda fucked, the progressbar jumped around, didn't make any sense BUT it restored my files. Hooray!

Except SAC, it was still unreadable from Windows, but! Linux does see all the episodes so I guess it's a win... of some sort. It sill bothers me there is some - from Windows's point of view - invalid files and folders on my BACKUP disk, but this will be another story.

It turned out, libreELEC is using ntfs-3 (and not 3g), which is famous for this kind of errors - files disappearing and the filesystem becoming funky.

So, I ordered a drive just for my media and media PC, tho no idea how to format it (to be readable from anywhere else - maybe exFAT?)

But this scared me like hell 😅

Just wanted to share this with you guys, there's no moral of the story, except do not use ntfs heavily under Linux, or at least do not write it a lot, which is a known thing since forever, I was just a lazy ass, don't be like me, please, unless you have a Windows machine around and some luck. But relying on these two, well...

Cheers!

Update: I formatted my new media drive to ext4. In the end, it'll be a fixed disk under my TV in a linux box, this seemed to be the best choice. I don't think I'll pick it out and use it elsewhere that much or at all.

Hello guys!

I'm encountering some strange behaviour with audio controls and volumes, nothing extreme serious, just moderate annoyance source, so I thought maybe you can help me sort this one out! Also I hope this is the right community for this...

(intro)

The thing is, I'm running Debian Bookworm, with Plasma and I have a rather strange audio setup. It has its legacy reasons, but I use a sound card (CMI8738/CMI8768, it has 5.1 output), and as for the speakers, I've got a pair of active 2.0 speakers and an active subwoofer (which was a part of a 2.1 system, but now I just use only the woofer). These are connected separately to the card; the stereo pair goes to the green output jack (front) and the subwoofer goes to another, which I think is the center+woofer output.

For some reason, the center and woofer was swapped on my card, or the subwoofer was hooked to the other channel, no idea, but I was managed to change them in pulsaudio's config /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf and modifying [Mapping analog-surround-*], changing the order of lfe and front-center in channel-map.

Then I noticed I can't really control the woofer, it worked, the setup was working, but not in the way I wanted to. The goal was to make the system actually control the outputs as intended and think about it as a 2.1. Amongst the profiles, there were no 2.1 option, only stereo, quadrophonic, 5.1 and 7.1.

By adding this line to ~/.config/pulse/default.pa...

load-module module-combine channels=3 channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe

...and also editing ~/.config/pulse/daemon.conf by adding these to it (tho honestly I don't really remember, why)...

remixing-produce-lfe = yes
remixing-consume-lfe = yes
lfe-crossover-freq = 120
enable-remixing = yes

...I was managed to create a virtual output that behaves actually like 2.1. I can control both left and right channels and also the woofer on its own. Neat!

(the problem)

Now I have two volume controls. One for the "real" output - the 5.1 profile and the virtual one, the 2.1.

In Plasma toolbar, changing the volume with the scroll wheel is unpredictable, or, at least, I haven't really figured out how it works at the moment; sometimes it controls the real output, sometimes the virtual. On my left screen, it usually controls the real, on the right, most of the times it controls the virtual. But it just changed at the moment as I tried out, typing this post. Now both of them controls the real one.

The goal would be to have the real output constantly on 100%, and every volume controlling action should be take place on the virtual output.

Also, another strange thing is that even tho it looks like everything is fine and dandy, the overall output is low. When this happens, usually on the real output the left, right and woofer channels themselves are changed to lower (probably a previous state of the virtual output) volumes.

This all seems pretty random and unpredictable. If it works, it's awesome, and problems doesn't occur for days, but sometimes they do, and I have no idea why.

Any ideas?

(tl;dr)

I'd like to know why my volume controls (scroll wheel, volume keys) have effect on seemingly random outputs, and why do the volume of each channel that is present in my virtual output get change ON the physical setup (so the left, right and subwoofer sliders in the 5.1 output) persistently.

Thanks!