Unrecognised filenames in 404 errors

[Weedy Lady]

In checking my error log on my host server stats I find a lot of my /nameofsong.midi files show up as "file does not exist" because the request was for any or all of the following file names:
/nameofsong.rmi
/nameofsong.smi
/nameofsong.psb
/nameofsong.ssa
/nameofsong.idx
/nameofsong.idx
/nameofsong.srt
and sometimes the above plus /subtitles/nameofsong.rmi, etc.

Can anyone out there tell me why this is happening? Is it a weird operating system -- a weird browser -- or has some software like Real Player taken over and is translating the .midi extension to one it can handle?

This is not an unimportant problem: My web site is greeting cards and the music is an important part of each card -- would really like to know why this is hapening and what (if anything) I can do about it.

Thanks in advance for any help that is out there waiting..........

[rawdist]

It is just a suggestion, but it might be worth checking if all your filenames and links match case. The odd capital in a filename may make it come up as a broken link on some servers.

[Weedy Lady]

No, no -- please read my message again.

I did not say that nameofsong.mid came up as a broken link!

What I said was that nameofsong.mid is being changed to all those other extensions that appear nowhere at all in my html code.

That is the mystery.

[ChrisRC]

What's the user agent generating those hits?

The vast majority of my 404s seem to come from spiders that are on a fishing expedition for files that don't exist.

[Weedy Lady]

You wrote:
What's the user agent generating those hits?

I checked and they come from various places, most of which look like isp accounts to me.

[cyanide]

hmmm...

well, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe sub, idx, srt are sub-title formats...
might guess that while the file is playing it is looking for these subs and if they haven't been defined, then it's generating a 404

[Weedy Lady]

"....while the file is playing it is looking for these subs and if they haven't been defined, then it's generating a 404"

So..........you think maybe the midi file is playing OK but the browser is still looking for more? Interesting!

Occasionally I do get a message from someone who says they can't get the music files. I always write back and tell them to download the latest version of Windows Media player, and often this solves the problem for them, but not always.

I guess that with the vast amount of different equipment and software out there it is amazing that such a high percentage of stuff actually does come across as it is coded to do, isn't it?

I quite worrying about colors displaying differently a long time ago, though. Since I'm not selling anything, if my visitors like what they see I'm very happy, but if it doesn't display properly and they don't let me know I have had to accept the fact: "that's life". But I still would like to know why the crazy error reports on the .mid files. There aren't that many different errors listed, but the ones I do get display the entire list of stuff noted above at one session. I hate unsolved mysteries!

Thanks for your idea.

[paulhiles]

I think cyanide pointed to the most likely reason for these 404 errors. Embedding the .mid files in your pages is fine, however your visitors will all have different media players or plugins installed in their browsers. So, the choice of player used to actually play the files is out of your control.

If for example, someone was using the BSPlayer, the player would be be looking around to see if there were subtitle (.srt) files to accompany the sound file. I see this as the most likely explanation for all the different file extensions appended to your soundfile names.

Here's a list of the data formats you listed above, along with their association.

• .idx Index (many - FoxPro)
  .psb Pinnacle Sound Bank
  .rmi Midi file (RIFF RMID format)
  .smi RealPlay SMIL file
  .srt BSplayer Subtitle file
  .ssa Subtitles

[Weedy Lady]

Thank you so much for the good information! I figured the extensions stood for specific players. I get about a couple dozen of these per month, and out of an average of 50,000 different visitors I guess it's not enough to worry about what kind of coding might be necessary to cope with all the different players, or how many additional files I would have to create and upload to my web server to take care of them.

It is true that we live in a Microsoft world, and even though a lot of you very fine people on this forum hate that, it is the fact I deal with when coding my pages and creating my files.

Thanks all for your input!!!