The online music distribution system I have been working on for the training band has been well received but one person did alert me to a file that seemed not to be available. Rather than just fix that problem, I decided it was probably wise to create a way of checking for other files that were also missing. We’ve now got 250 individual music parts available although most band members see a much smaller selection. That is only going to grow and will be increasingly hard to spot by manual checks.

My solution was to write a quick Python script to look for what the database thinks is available and to then test if it is actually named and located as expected. I actually found six items that needed attention. Four were naming failures in the database: both french horn parts were called “French Horn” but should have been “French Horn 1” and “French Horn 2” to match the associated files; alto and bari sax parts would have been inaccessible for another piece because the database was pointing at “Eb Alto Sax” and “Eb Bari Sax”. There were also two files that were simply missing. It looks like that idea of building an audit tool was a worthwhile one.

I think that has done the job for now and I will run it again from time to time as I build the collection. Future ideas include potentially limiting the scope of the checks (if all three bands get on board, that will be thousands of files so it might run slower than the blink of an eye) and a double check that each file is not only on my local system but also available on the website. Job done for now though.