Sansa e250 album art issue

[joshritger]

I have run across three problems with my sansa e250 when using album art.  These problems only occur when I use album art, when I remove the album art none of these problems exist.

Sansa e250 (rockbox build r20321-090313 from today (3/12/2009).
8 gig micro sdhc card
the files are in ogg format at 256 kbps

Problem 1: Sometimes I get  this message "error accessing playlist control file" when shutting down.

Problem 2: Database refresh takes place every restart after the previous error.

Problem 3: Some Songs skip at the begining of the song, mostly about 2-3 seconds into the song. This  usually occurs when I am skipping through a few songs in a row.

All of these errors only take place when album art is present.

I have had these issues in the past with other builds also.

Could the album art files be too big? They are not resized from the pc, some are as big as 500 x 500.


Any help is greatly appreciated.

[LambdaCalculus]

You should definitely resize your album art. Even though we now have album art scaling in SVN, it's still best to bring the album art size down enough that Rockbox doesn't have to spend much time reducing the size of one piece of art, thereby leaving performance unhindered.

Here's a small rule of thumb I usually follow regarding album art: On my Mac, I'll use an app to scale down my artwork to whatever WPS uses the *largest* art (this means that, for example, my Gigabeat F and S use a WPS that displays 200x200 album art, the biggest of all WPSes on both players). This way, I'll have decent looking art on both the WPS I use, and whatever other WPS is there, along with good performance.

So for the e250, try reducing it to, say, 140x140 (which is a little larger than the default WPS displays (120x120) but will let you have nice looking album art on future WPSes), and take it from there.

[joshritger]

Will try that, would that cause that many problems?

[LambdaCalculus]

None whatsoever; it works nicely on my e280.