ID3 database has telepathy or something...

[mosta]

I just switched my Gigabeat F40 this week, and I'm very glad about it. One little annoying--or, more, weird--thing is that the ID3 database is somehow extracting info on the files that isn't as far as I can tell there.

I like to keep my file names and tags very, very clean. No multiple listings because of different punctuation ("&" versus "and") or even different groups where the main artist is the same ("Hemingway Quartet" versus Quintent; "Jimi Hendrix" versus "Jimi Hendrix Experience"). For compilations where those tracks are the only thing I have by an artist, I don't want an artist listing for just a single. I switch the whole compilation artist to a dummy (eg Red Hot and Blue, becomes Cole Porter as artist). I also don't like "The" starting any titles or artists and creating a subdirectory.

So I reload my files after installing RB (and converting from WMA). and a lot of the above issues are in my database. So I clean up the file names and the ID3 tags. I change "artist" and "composer" and "band" and various other hidden tags I can't quite remember like wm/arist or wwwartist. And I reinitialize the database. And then I delete the database files and reinitialize.

and yet now I still have listings for "Rolling Stones" and "The Rolling Stones" (with as far as I can see the same stuff). I can't understand where it is getting the "The"s from, b/c I've deleted them every place I can find them. And now on Red Hot and Blue, the tracks are all by "Cole Porter", except one lists as by "Annie Lennox", so it's not going to play under the same reference. How in the world is RB doing this?

Thanks for any ideas. and when I get past this, next I need to see if I can get RB to display the album art...

[mosta]

ok I may be starting to figure it out. I had a bunch of files in my recycle bin that I thought were gone and RB is finding them. Hopefully this will start its getting sorted out...

[AlexP]

Rockbox searches the entire disk, however I think you can tell it not to look in certain directories (I can't remember how, perhaps someone else can remind us).  However, it is really your responsibility to empty the recycle bin.

And please do not double post, use modify instead.

[pixelma]

You need to put an empty file (a "dummy") called 'database.ignore' into the folder which you want to exclude from the database search, if I'm not mistaken. There is one file like this in the .rockbox folder - so it should work but I've never tried myself. This feature is quite new which is why it's not well documented yet.

[bascule]

Or run the 'disktidy' plugin that will delete the recycle bin and any other Windows/Mac cruft from your player

[GodEater]

...and next time you plug your gigabeat into your PC, you can mark the drive as not having a recycle bin too - so the files won't end up there in the first place.