Minimserver not finding new music on Linux System

[Bernard]

I'm posting about a solved problem, mainly to help others that may get frustrated by this issue, and partly as a future feature request.

Context
I run Minimserver on a lightweight PC running Kubuntu (Ubuntu OS with KDE window manager), on which I also manage the audio file ripping and tagging.

Problem
None of the audio files I ripped and added to my collection in the last few days were getting detected by automatic or forced rescans of MinimServer. It was as if those files didn't even exist.

Causes
After an extensive troubleshooting process (logging system is very helpful), I've positively identified that the cause of MinimServer ignoring these files was that these files had no file extension. This may surprise exclusive-Windows users, but GNU Linux systems tend to be ambivalent about file extensions. It certainly took me a long time to notice that the FLAC files giving me trouble were named "This Song Don't Work", compared to others named "This Song Works Fine.flac".

The reason this started to become an issue for me in the last few days was that I've recently moved from the fantastic Kid3 tagger to the more powerful puddletag. Kid3 preserves extensions, while puddletag lets you blow them away easily. That is, I used to have file extensions, but didn't really pay attention; then I didn't, and so didn't really notice the change.

Let this post be a warning to others.

Feature Requests
Firstly, I think the "Audio files" and/or "File scanning" sections on the "Your music library" page in the User Guide could be more explicit on the need for extensions. That is, files without extensions are ignored.

It's true that the list of "filetypes" are listed as extensions, such as ".flac", which would imply that the extension is needed. But, a FLAC file without an extension is still a FLAC filetype. In any case, I read over this page many times during my troubleshooting before the idea finally occurred to me.

Secondly, I think it would be better for MinimServer to, in the first instance, on *nix platforms, ignore extensions and read filetypes from within the files. There may be other reasons why this is a bad idea, but I just wanted to put it out there. I'm surprised this isn't how it works at the moment. Obviously, this isn't an urgent issue.