I do not have enough understanding of this issue for the moment but please bear with me and I'll edit/improve the question to make it of more general scope as soon as I get proper help and I better understand the matter.
So, I keep my music files on an external (Samsung, fat32) drive and use Foobar2000 with Wine to edit their tags (get tags from freedb, among other things)
Now I cannot do that anymore. The same files can be edited if copied on the desktop.
I guess this is related to the fact that the external drive is auto-mounted with limited privileges: in Thunar its files and folders have a lock/cross/etc (depending on the icons I use)
How to remedy this?
(I'm in Lubuntu 12.04)
Odd thing is that adding a second external drive does not involve the same issue.
while their permissions look the same One difference between them is that the one with the problem is fat32 and the other is ntfs.
They look like this in gparted
Bu this doesn't seem to count: switching them between the two usb slots made them mount both ok, but putting them back in the initial order changed the issue: made Samsung load ok while the other one showed the lock sign. Maybe it's related to the order in which they are plugged...
Even more bizarre is that while the Samsung with music was thus ok, I started to edit the tags of music files in Foobar2000, as intended. After succeeding in doing that for an album, the second would not be edited: the same issue re-emerged. Restarting Thunar I see now that the lock/cross sign went back from the second external drive to the Samsung!!!
How to automount all external devices (also: always and permanently) with full privileges?