[SOLVED] Permission issues when opening up smb/cifs mounted files

[JR_West]

before you start yelling at me about how it's permission issue with the mount, or the FS, or the user,

the user account that audacity is running under can :
cd the whole tree to the files
run ffprobe/ffmpeg on the files (mp3s)
play the files in vlc and mpv, both from the shell and from nautilus
all of the above works fine.
ps -ef says audacity is running under the same account as the above.

the audaciy log just says error 13 (Permission denied).

details:
Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Audacity 2.3.2 installed via snap.

I was previous running audacity 2.2.1 from the ubuntu repro and it did not have this issue.

Here is the mount from fstab:
//nas1/media /media/user_me/media cifs noperm,noauto,credentials=/home/user_me/.smbcredentials 0 0

Any ideas, or better logging to turn on? Maybe a strace?

[steve]

A full description of what you are trying to do would be useful.

[JR_West]

Just trying to open a mp3 file on a network mounted drive. Either by File -> Open, or by drag-n-drop the file via nautilus. Both from a freshly launched audacity.

Also of note : Audacity's file picker can't navigate the /media directory, even though it's permissions are set to read by everyone. Permission denied

Code: Select all

ls -ld /media
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 10  2018 /media

I've just been entering the fill path to the file in Audacity's file picker, but the result is the same.

again. no other apps seems to have a problem playing files off this mount, and a shell under the same user seems to have proper access.

[steve]

I've just checked, and Audacity doesn't support SMB protocol. What I generally do is to just copy the files to a local disk.
Also, note that it is a bad idea to work on "projects" on a network drive because Audacity expects immediate access to its data. There is no network buffering built into Audacity.

[JR_West]

I don't understand. It's a mounted file system. There is no need to support anything except opening a file. the OS takes care of the details of SMB, or NFS, or ext3 or FAT or whatever the file-system is.

The first thing Audacity does with mp3 files is de-compress it. I assume it uses /tmp or some other local cache for that. so there shouldn't be any perf issues with using network FS becides the inital de-compress. Either way,... Audacity doesn't need any SMB count. VLC doesn't have any, and it works fine opening files on a network FS. Also, version 2.2x worked fine. So I still think there is an issue here.

[JR_West]

SOLOVED

Turns out this is a problem with snap installed software. By default it can't access any file outside of your home directory or any removable media. The 2.2.x version I had installed was via apt-get, so that's why it worked.

using the --devmode flag on the snap install fixes it (note: the --classic flag does not).

Seems crazy that snap would limit access to any files outside of your home-dir by default. At least it seems crazy for any type of pix/video/audio editor where removable media is highly likely. Oh well.. not my hill to die on.