[mb-devel] Client SDK problem (newbie!)

[Andy Bridle]

A couple of questions from a new user of the MusicBrainz Win32 Client SDK
(v2.1.4). I've surprised myself by getting so far so quickly, but I can't
work out what to do about this problem:

I'm using the SDK from C++ in VS2005. When I do an artist query, using
mb_QueryWithArgs, most of the time it works OK, but if I do a query for eg
"Fred" (without the quotes) the query fails with an assert failure in
VS2005's CRT function _chvalidator (in file isctype.c), called from
RDF_Parse/XML_Parse, while checking a char c with an int value of -61. The
CRT code is:

	_ASSERTE((unsigned)(c + 1) <= 256);

Presumably this is because there's a Fred on the MB DB somewhere with an
umlaut or similar character in his name. The assert fails in both UTF-8 and
ISO-8859-1 modes, but goes away in the Release version of my code because
the CRT only does the assert in Debug mode. Does anyone have any suggestions
for handling this (short of just ignoring the failed assert and the
subsequent one from _chvalidator_l)? 

As a follow up, the reason I'm querying for artist Fred is that I'm trying
to see if there's a way of using the queries to give me the first 25 Freds,
tell me there are more to follow, and then give me the next 25 etc. I'm
guessing that this isn't possible with the predefined queries, and that I'd
have to learn a lot more about RDF. Is this correct?

And finally, on a more general level that may not be appropriate for this
list (apologies if this is so), as a developer who was caught up in the CDDB
debacle, I'd be interested to know what other developers feel about the
viability of MusicBrainz as a CDDB/FreeDB alternative. To me it looks like
the only game in town, but I guess it depends to some extent on how many
developers commit to it. Any thoughts welcome.

Regards,

Andy Bridle


-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.408 / Virus Database: 268.13.4/480 - Release Date: 17/10/2006