Cannot initialize database on iPod Video 5.5 before battery dies

[rbox]

I've got an iPod Video 5.5 (30 gig firmware, though 80 gig HD) and I'm having a heck of a time getting RockBox to initialize the database.

I'm using RockBox version r20953-90516.

Long story short: it takes so much time to initialize the database that the battery dies before completing the process -- even if I'm powering the unit through USB. (I have around 1,200 "albums" -- and some of those "albums" are fairly big.)

It seems to be a very similar problem to what this person had...

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=20903.0

...but I've not been able to find a solution so far. I've even installed a new battery, thinking that might help. (It didn't.) 

Any ideas?

[Chronon]

It shouldn't take any more than a few minutes with that size of collection.  I suspect that Rockbox is hanging due to some improperly handled (from its perspective "bad") metadata.  You can probably get it to build with a subset of your current files.  If you can isolate problem files then this is generally of interest to developers.

I have an almost full Gigabeat F40 and it only takes a few minutes to scan my entire collection.

[rbox]

When it's scanning, the first few screen updates will add quickly (like, adding 5-15 files at a time), but soon after it'll add just one file at a time.

FWIW, all of my mp3s are tagged almost entirely with with ID3v1.1 tags. I used a free app called Mp3 Tag Tools to tag them. Is it possible I should re-tag everything with ID3v2.x or some other (recommended) app?

Also, I've organized it so that all of the album files in the main mp3 directory are "flat" -- meaning there's one directory where there's ~1,200+ directories named like...

ArtistName - AlbumName1
ArtistName - AlbumName2
ArtistName - AlbumName3
...etc

It's more convenient in the file browser to be able to scroll through everything that way rather than having to first pick an artist, then pick an album (which is how I had to organize things on my previous mp3 player). Besides, even if I organized things in an Artist\Album format, I'd still have probably around the same number of directories at the Artist level...

[GodEater]

If you're happy with this (to me, at least) unwieldy structure for your music - why are you bothering with the database at all ?

I suspect the large number of files all in one directory is part of the problem - FAT is not very efficient with large directories, and this sounds like a very large directory indeed.

[rbox]

Actually... I think I fixed it.

I removed the .rockbox directory, got the latest build, put it on, then initialized the database (which worked on a fully-charged iPod).

I suspect it might've been one or more of the following three things:

   * The DriveBox theme I was using
   * The fact that I had done so many hard reboots trying to get things to work (thus corrupting something)
   * Some setting I'd made when trying to get things to work, inadvertently affecting RB's performance (I was having other problems too, like RockBox freezing when pausing a song played in File mode, crunching through the hard drive for long periods of time, taking forever to play a select a new song, etc.)

So, anyway, it seems things are working fine now.

UPDATE: I'm almost positive it was the DriveBox theme. I don't know if it's too memory-intensive for my iPod or what... it's a shame, as it's a very nice, readable theme.