Can't get any songs to play. ipod 30gig 5th gen

[Rustang351c]

Hi,
I was really excited about this because I thought I was going to be a straight drag and drop deal and my file structure would be the same w/o itunes renaming everything to jibberish.

I installed rockbox3.2 on my 2005’ 30 gig ipod, used windows explorer to delete all the old files out of the itunes hidden music folder and copied my music folders to the itunes/music folder.

When I browsed to database on rockbox, it shows the old data(songs) I just deleted.

I went back to windows explorer and deleted everything again, looked on the ipod, and the database says they're still there, but they won’t play.
I read you need something like mediamonkey to sync it to instead of drag and dropping. So I downloaded that, updated the artist-name-genres on 5000 songs, sync’ed it, and the same thing is happening. uggg.

I looked at this thread,  http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28006
,added a musica folder and changed musicmonkey to sync to the ‘musica’ folder, but it put the songs in itunes/music again and the ipod still isn’t seeing them. Windows Explorer Properties says theres 21 gigs on it, but it won’t play a song.

I tried using the disktidy plugin…

I tried reinstalling rockbox 3.2 w the rockbox utility…

When I hit ‘select’ to play a song; it asks ‘erase dynamic playlist?’ if I select Yes, it trys to play XNXY.m4a  (or similar name) for a few secs then returns to database. If I select No it returns to the database.

Any ideas? Is there a way to reformat the ipod and start over?

Thanks, Russ

[Chronon]

Why put them in the hidden iPod_Control folder?  You are allowed to put files anywhere you like.

Your problem seems to be that you didn't update the database after removing the old files and adding new ones.  You can always use the file browser to make sure that playback is working properly. 

[Rustang351c]

I missed the part about updating the database after sync'ing. Thanks!   

[Chronon]

You can set the database to auto-update.  This should catch when you add files, but may not notice deletions unless you also enable directory cache.  You may as well do this anyway if you like to use the file browser.  Directory cache indexes the file tree in RAM so you can use the file browser without having to spin up the hard drive.