opening file from downloaded email attachment

• Sep 17, 2010 - 13:52

I've just had a weird experience with trying to open files that I downloaded from attachments to email.

I had students in my college course use MuseScore .9.5 all last year. They would send their assignments to me via email attachment. We had no trouble.

We just started up our new semester and the 60 students I have in two sections of this course were sending me their first assignments, this year using .9.6.1 (.9.6.2 wasn't available when I first distributed the program). None of their files would open. MuseScore crashed in .9.6.1. I then changed to .9.6.2 and it didn't crash, but nothing appeared.

Files copied/pasted into a network drive worked fine. Clearly something was going on in the email transmission. This had our Director of Computing and Network Services completely puzzled for a couple days. He finally realized that the compressed MuseScore format (the default) was exactly like a .zip file and could be extracted (he used 7-zip). When he did that he discovered the meta data and further realized that files with capitalized extension (.MSCZ) wouldn't open. For some reason they still don't know for sure, the emailed attachments had capilized extensions. Renaming the file with lower-case extension (.mscz) corrects the opening problem. Here's what he communicated to me:

"If the extension is .mscz it opens fine. If it's .MSCZ it doesn't work. We think the difference is that the uppercase one comes across if file extensions are hidden on the PC. I'm actually not sure what causes one behavior or the other. Specifically, the case of the filename has to match the case of the filename found in the "container.xml" file inside the archive. At any rate, I'm guessing it used to be case insensitive, and they broke something in the code, and that's why you're seeing the problem now. "

Weird, right? Has anyone else seen this problem, or might just be our Novel GroupWise email client?

Norman Lowrey


Comments

Hi Norman,

Thanks for sharing this. I have not yet came a across a similar report on the forum. I'm interested to hear if someone else has came across this issue.

One last thing: could we add a flag on our map to represent your school?

In reply to by Thomas

You already have my school on your map - Drew University, Madison, NJ.

I'll be making another donation from the school soon.

As far as the error you refer to - I don't have that same issue. It's not a matter of double-clicking a file to open it not working, it's if the file extension is MSCZ rather than mscz, whether double clicking or loading in from MuseScore file menu.

Thanks

In reply to by Norman Lowrey

I'm looking into this issue. Which operating system do you use ? and your students ? I can't reproduce using Windows only.

Edit : Sorry, I can reproduce on windows now. MuseScore expects mscz files to be have the extension in lower case. It's now fixed for next version and MuseScore will be able to open low and up case extension.
I created an issue for the record : #7197: MuseScore fails to open MSCZ files with capitals

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