Letter to the Dev: thoughts about "Autofind Music"

[GhostLyrics]

Dear Dylan,

First of all, I tremendously enjoy playing Audiosurf 2. I bought it as soon as it was available on OS X. I longed for that to happen since one of my favorite games I had to leave behind when switching operating systems was Audiosurf (1). While I personally find Mono a little harder than in AS1 (or do I recall it having an "easy" mode?) I still love every minute I play.

However, I am of the confound impression that the "autofind music" feature is not well implemented. From this forum thread I gather that before you were not scanning external disks. Right now, you are doing some things that are worse and will probably result in the scan never finishing its run. Here are some recommendations on how to make it better.

• Build either a blacklist or whitelist of folders, with the content of that varying by operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux)
  
• Exclude system folders
  
• Set a maximum amount of depth that you follow symlinks / NTFS junctions. The lower, the better.
  
• Think about implementing a time-out. (This is not necessarily a good idea, just something to think about when you're scanning for more than, say, 30 minutes.)

Here are some suggestions for exclusions, prefixed by operating system for your convenience:

• OS X: ~/Library (contains preferences, caches, etc for your user account)
  
• OS X: /Volumes/Time Machine (contains the external copy of time machine, the Apple provided backup system)
  
• OS X: /Volumes/MobileBackups (contains the local version of time machine, enabled for all laptops on which Time Machine is active)
  
• OS X: /Volumes/BOOTCAMP (NTFS volume which is there when someone enables dual-booting with Windows on their Mac)
  
• OS X: Generally don't read outside of a user's home, unless it's a portable device (/Volumes/…)
  
• OS X: Don't access hidden folders (starting with ".")
  
• Windows: C:\Windows (system components)
  
• Windows: C:\Program Files (installation data)
  
• Windows: C:\Program Files(x86) (installation data for 32bit applications on 64bit systems)
  
• Windows: %appdata%, %localappdata% and %appdata%/.../locallow (Microsoft explains this better than I would[windows.microsoft.com])
  
• Linux: Generally don't read outside of a user's home, unless it's a portable device (/mnt/…, /media/…, /mount/…)
  
• Linux: Don't access hidden folders (starting with ".")

I have built this list in order to try and help you make AS2 an even greater game which actually finishes automatically finding my music instead of digging through my local and external backups, accidentally indexing music that might be gone the next time and following potential symlink circles. I sincerely hope this helps you.

Regards
GhostLyrics

[Dusk of Oolacile]

To be honest I still don't even get the point of a search/autofind feature. Are there really people who don't know what music they have on their computer, and where they keep it?

[GhostLyrics]

Originally posted by LOLCAT:

Are there really people who don't know what music they have on their computer, and where they keep it?

Maybe, but personally I would like to use search instead of digging through several layers of folders.

[Dylan]

Thanks!

[Bupknar]

In addition, please don't search through virtual filesystems like /proc on Linux. I constantly see the indexer searching through /proc, and that's not only unnecessary (will never find any music there!), but could potentially also crash the game (for example /proc/self/fd contains symlinks to all the files that are opened by the current process, trying to reopen those could get messy depending on how the scanning is implemented).