Error accessing playlist file and playlist corruptions with flac files

[jimbobuk]

I just got my gigabeat F40 yesterday and am trying to be sure the hardware is fully functional in case i have to install it. I followed instructions off the site and installed the latest version (i think) with my macbook.

Booted up fine, all looked good. I've had a go with the manual and finding my way round the system, as a tester i put a few albums in .flac format into a new directory called music, under - - subdirectories.

Found them via filemode and started playing them, all looked good. I then enabled the database and started looking at that, at first i was shocked as some files i was listening too werent present.. turned out that their tags were incomplete hence not shown.

I then finally tried an album that did show up all the files only for it to start having problems.. at first I didn't pay attention but then it started to be a bit slow at responding, eventually freezing on the WPS screen playing a song.

I couldn't turn off the player normally so thankfully the gigabeat's battery switch let me cut the power. I checked the sound of the hdd and it didn't sound like it was accessing anything, though it was spinning.

On reboot it all seemed a bit better, so i went to add the same album again. Looking in the playlist view i got the error

Error accessing playlist file

after this it would either not show me the playlist view, show me an empty view, or show me a playlist view with some of the files in it, and holes where tracks should be that were either empty, showing parts of the track names, or just showing garbage ASCII characters.

I was on the irc channel at the time and someone advised me to remove (and backup) the playlist file off the rockbox, i did this and the playlist was fixed.. looking at the file on the PC it looked ok, didn't have corrupt characters at least, and aside from some seperating characters for Playing and Queing and a -1 or two it was just the names of the files that were in the playlist.

Back onto the rockbox in playing mode and the same album and some other albums were causing similar problems, i've not really used it much today at work for fear of it breaking, so haven't had chance to really nail what does and does not cause the problem.

At the moment i'm not sure if going via the database view seems to make it more likely to break or not... when it first started happening someone was explaining to me about how to hold the select button to get the context sensitive option to add an album (or folder) to the (dynamic) playlist.. doing this to Insert, Queue or perhaps any option in there seems to make it more likely to break but thats without doing some real testing.

Other than that the only other thing i've just remembered is when i started uploading the flac album folders via my macbook i added the first folder, came to add a 2nd and created a new folder, renamed it and then hit this strange situation where both folders were renamed to this new name.. both contained the original folders contents, yet they were of an unknown size... something had clearly gone a bit wrong, and now i remmeber it its this that worries me.. i worry the hdd is a bit borked, or the hardware.. would prefer it to be a bug or a broken install.

I've installed some themes, but i'm told this would be unlikely to cause this problem. I'll have a good look over the hdd tonight, and double check the integrity of all the files.. may copy a few gigs onto the drive and off and ensure that no corruptions are occuring.

Any advice would really be appreciated, i'm keen to do whatever is needed to try and help find out if it is a bug.

Cheers

[JdGordon]

grab the latest build from http://build.rockbox.org/ sounds like you got the build with broken playlsits (my fault... all fixed now though)

[jimbobuk]

Thanks, this sounds great.. i connected up my player to my PC last night and looked around.. deleted the annoying . files the mac had created, verified that the particularly troublesome album was all fine as a flac and as far as it was tagged.

I'll try the new build out tomorrow.. is this a specific gigabeat fix, or a core rockbox fix.. this is my first time grabbing an updated rockbox, are the different hardware targets literally makefile targets so when a new build is compiled its compiled out to all the working makefile targets.. meaning you'll nearly always be able to find an updated version for your particular player.

Any ideas what revision/version number your fix went in, so i can be sure i'm running the right version, tho the absence of the problem will be enough of an indicator.

I take it to update is just a case of extracting the version into the .rockbox folder.. i'll back it up to be sure.

Thanks.

[JdGordon]

firstly... short post are sweet posts...

all targets are built every time a change is commited..

r13296 is the first one with the bug fixed

[jimbobuk]

firstly... short post are sweet posts...

yes, fair point.. sorry for that.. I'll try harder next time, to be honest i hijacked my own thread as I'm only a day into using rockbox I have a lot of questions in my mind that tend to just come out when i start.

Thanks again for all the info, and help. I'll try out the fix later.

[jimbobuk]

ok, not had chance to test it much yet but on early tests the version i got last night seems to have this problem fixed... Great stuff.. now to get listening and playing.

Cheers